You will need to produce a research report that includes a quantitative analysis of a text corpus of your own creation.
The paper will (mostly) be in standard APA formatting (12-point font, page numbers, 1” margins, etc.), except that it should be single (rather than double) spaced throughout. It is of utmost importance that you provide comprehensive in-text citations with corresponding full references at the end of the paper. Failure to do this can result in a charge of plagiarism, which is a violation of academic integrity.
The paper will be structured into the following sections (and you are free to use subsections of each, as appropriate).
Title Page with Abstract:
The title page will contain (eponymously) the paper’s title, author, date, course identification, and brief abstract. You will find that the abstract is probably the last thing you write since it summarizes the research work as a whole. This will be its own, unnumbered page.
It is not expected that you will need to provide a table of contents (nor lists of tables, figures, etc.).
Introduction:
In the introduction you will provide the problem statement (what you are attempting to address with this line of research) including your motivation and justification of why this research should be done. This is your chance to introduce the “research gap”. Sell the reader on your idea here. Finding your research question can be the most challenging part of a research project (only rivalled by identifying and collecting the relevant data). Be willing to adapt your problem statement to your changing understanding of the problem domain as your understanding develops (that is, as you work through the project). However, what you finally propose here must be what is supported in the following sections.
You will also introduce the rest of your paper (see the last paragraph of the Introduction from “Uncovering the impact of COVID-19 on shipping and logistics” for an example of how this is done). Link: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/MABR-03-2021-0018/full/pdf?title=uncovering-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-shipping-and-logistics
Literature Review:
This is where you will cover what others in this domain have done related to your research question. Address what other researchers in your topic area have used for data (how data gathering was performed), and analysis methods and tools. Do not just provide a series of synopses of a pool of related papers, but instead identify common themes and group your review of the papers by those themes (see section 2.1 of “Uncovering the impact of COVID-19 on shipping and logistics” and how three streams of analysis are identified and discussed separately from 2.2 where a review of the methods used in other works is presented).
Methodology:
Here you will discuss the approach you take to perform the text analysis. It can be rule-based, machine-learning-based, or both. You should include a justification as to why you chose to perform the analysis this way, as opposed to alternative approaches. This can be due to precedent, requirements of underlying theory, data structure, etc. You should cover your text data finding and collection activities, feature identification, pre-processing, and result generation.
Results:
Present the results and your validation criteria, procedures, and metrics to illustrate that your analysis is correct, complete, and legitimate (it properly measures the research variables that you expected). Any visualizations will likely appear here. This should reflect back to your initial research questions and/or hypotheses, and how those were demonstrated to be confirmed or denied. This is not the place for comments or opinions on what was done or your findings. That belongs in the next section.
Discussion and Future Work:
In this section of your paper, you will provide a synopsis of your work. This is also your chance to introduce any limitations that you know might restrict the reproducibility of your findings. Provide any next steps that might be made to strengthen or extend this research into related problem areas.
Works Cited:
Every entry here must correspond to an in-text citation and every in-text citation must have an entry here. I strongly suggest using a bibliography manager, such as Zotero.
