the conclusion to a research paper is really really important why because it's your last chance to convince the reviewer the reader that your paper is actually important it's your chance to highlight the contribution of your paper to highlight the novelty it's your chance to acknowledge the limitations but then highlight the value of your paper and make suggestions for future research so their conclusion is a very important section but luckily for all of us it's actually quite easy to write and in this video I'm going to show you exactly how to do this if you're new
here my name iskovic and I run academic English now where I help PhD students and researchers regularly publish research papers in top journals in the field and in some of my other videos I've talked about how to write the introduction for a research paper we talked about the discussion section the literature review but in here I want to focus just on the conclusion section and there are are several important elements that you should include but at the same time you should keep your conclusion fairly brief in some Fields it will be like one paragraph in
other fields you know maybe two or three paragraphs but you definitely don't want to make it any longer so what are some of these important elements and some of them mind you and I'll point that out can also go into other sections of your paper so stick around until the end of the video because I will explain which sections alternatively the elements of the conclusion can also go into so the first thing that you've got to do at the beginning is to restate either the main topic or straight away you know the main result of
your study so something like you know this study aimed to and then you just restate your aim you know and then the findings of this study show that and then like in maybe two sentences you want to tell us specifically the most important find it it a really important thing here the most important findings you know you've already presented the findings so don't spend like a whole paragraph restating the findings you know we already know that we're just interested in the main takeaway message in here right and then what you might want to do is
just briefly discuss those findings what do those findings actually mean um for you know for your field for practitioners right what are the implications of your findings what do they actually mean you might briefly discuss them and again briefly because you've already done it you will have had a discussion section so in here we just very briefly put them in context and then we want to highlight what is novel about our findings and this is really important you know so definitely use phrases like you know this is the first paper to of course if your
paper is the first to do something you know or phrases like one important contribution of this paper is or this paper makes a valuable contribution to just to highlight you know and leave no room for doubt what's novel about your paper right so that's kind of like your first paragraph very often number two what you also want to do is to present practical implications of your paper if your findings have some implications for practice or for Theory then present them as well this is really important right and afterwards you want to present the limitations of
your study now a pro tip here is to when you present a limitation to then combine it with some sort of a defense why you actually did it right so for example you might say that this study is limited to a small number of participants and it was only conducted in one city right therefore the findings cannot be generalized right but then if you just leave this then you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot because we want to end instead on a positive note so what you might want to say then is that however
you know despite this limitation this study makes an important contribution because X Y and Z and then you explain why your study is important so you want to you know try to minimize the limitation and defend yourself right or you know or Justify why your approach was appropriate to this particular problem right what you can also do is when you state a limitation combine it with suggestions for future research right so you can again state elementation with this study is limited to a very small sample size therefore we cannot generalize the findings and then you
can say you know as a result it is suggested that future research conducts studies with a larger group of participants for example right so make suggestions for future research and combine them with your limitations now so this is you know the the iceberg below the water this is the kind of the overall structure that is very very common however of course there are differences between conclusions in different journals in different disciplines so what you might find for example is that the limitations of your study and suggestions for future research will actually be placed at the
end of the discussion section not in the conclusion section right you might also find that the suggestions for practice or practical implications are also placed in the discussion section and not in the conclusion so what happens to the conclusion then what do we do in the conclusion well then it becomes very very short like one paragraph and the only thing that we want to do in the conclusion is just basically in each sentence Summarize each main aspect so like in sentence one you can restate the main the the aim in sentence two restate the main
results then briefly discuss them in the following sentence say what the implication nations are you know what the main contribution of your study is maybe point out a limitation and then make a suggestion for future research or end once again with the main contribution of your paper so you would then just have one paragraph right now another really important difference that I want to point out is that in some Fields discussion and conclusion are actually combined into just one section now in which Fields is this common primarily in my experience this is very very common
in different medical Fields also sometimes I've seen it in psychology as well so what happens then well you just have one section called discussions and conclusion right and in that section you go over the same discussion pattern that I've discussed in another video right but to give you a brief overview here you kind of in each paragraph you present the main result you compare it with literature you explain and then you enter separate and then the next main result literature explanation interpretation and so on and then towards the end of that section you can point
out the limitations of your study and then make suggestions for future research and of course as you're also explaining and interpreting your findings you can also in those paragraphs you can point out practical implications alternatively you can have a separate paragraph in which you will point out practical implications so writing the conclusion follows a very predictable pattern don't add any new information just conclude and repeat what you've already said in terms of the aim the main results discussion and then highlight the contribution of your paper the novelty of your paper and then point out any
limitations make suggestions for future research and also show any practical or theoretical implications of your results now if you need more help you want to get personalized feedback on your writing regular guidance and a step-by-step process to writing papers then book a free one-to-one consultation where we're going to go over your main challenges and outline a personalized plan and show you how we can help you achieve your goals and publish more papers and the link to that free consultation is right below this video
