Research paper formats vary depending on the style guide you follow when preparing your manuscript. Typically, these guides provide instructions for formatting citations, references, fonts, page layout, and section headings. With multiple resources available online, browsing through various style guides may become cumbersome. To simplify this process, we have curated the formatting guidelines recommended by three common formatting styles—American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)—to help you format your research paper.

Components of a Research Paper

Before you begin formatting, it is important to understand the key components of a research paper and their purposes. Ideally, your research paper should contain the following elements:

• Title/Cover page: The title page or the cover page contains the manuscript title along with the authors’ details, such as names, affiliations, corresponding author information, and any other requirements specified by the target journal.

• Abstract: The abstract is a crucial element that piques the reader’s interest to dive further into your research. It may be structured or unstructured, capturing the research objectives, methods, key findings, and conclusions of your study. You may refer to your target journals’ guidelines to know the recommended word count limit (typically ranges from 150 to 250 words).

• Introduction: This section introduces the research topic, provides relevant background information, presents the research questions, and highlights the significance or novelty of your study. The introduction should be concise, offering enough context for the reader to understand the study’s purpose.

• Methods: This section describes the research methodology, which includes the materials used for the analysis, study design, data collection techniques, and, if appliable, statistical analyses and details of study subjects or participants. This section is generally divided into relevant sub-sections for clarity.

• Results: Here,you need to present the study findings in an organized manner. You may include tables, graphs, figures, and other suitable illustrations.

• Discussion: This section interprets the obtained results and discusses their implications. The study findings can be compared with existing literature, and any limitations or drawbacks observed in your analysis can be acknowledged while highlighting future research directions.

• Conclusion: The final section of your manuscript restates the study objective, summarizes the key findings, highlights their broader implications, presents the overall conclusions, and underscores the future scope of your research.

• References: All the sources cited in your manuscript are listed here. Depending on the selected citation style, reference may be arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name (Harvard referencing) or in the order of citation appearance (Vancouver referencing).