How to Write an APA Style Research Paper Introduction [INFOGRAPHIC]

Writing APA-style papers is a tricky business. So to complement my discussion of writing publishable scientific articles, I’ve created an infographic showing some of the major ideas you should consider when writing the introduction to an APA-style research paper. This approach will work well in most social scientific fields, especially Psychology. If you’re writing a short paper, you might only have the first section (the “intro to the intro”) and something like either Subheading 2 or 3. It all depends on the particular research question you’re asking!

The key to writing scientific papers is that you throw out most of what you know about writing stories. Scientific research papers are based upon logical, organized arguments, and scientists expect to see a certain structure of ideas when they read papers. So if you want your paper to be read, you need to meet those expectations.