<p>Could you please recommend best books on writing university research papers for university research/publication or university research paper assignments or both?
What are the best books in thie field?</p>
<p>Just as books like Strunk and White, King's On Writing, and Nuts and Bolts are among the best in the field of general writing, what books are the best in the field of academic, scholarly research paper writing/publication?</p>
<p>I really want to master everything there is to writing the research paper for research/publication and/or for university research paper assignments.</p>
<p>Different fields have different requirements. I've seen a few copies of "Writing the Research Paper" floating around here at Penn. It is MLA (Modern Language Association) oriented.</p>
<p>Beyond that, every scholarly journal has its own style guide, sometimes differing only in minutiae of formatting from the others. Most provide MS Word style templates to make the mechanical part of formatting your paper easier.</p>
<p>Your best bet is to:</p>
<p>1) Study the style guides that the major journals in your field publish.
2) Talk to a couple professors about structure and style for different types of research. Obviously, an article proposing a new theoretical approach will be structured differently from one reporting experimental results.</p>
<p>If you're still in HS, you should also be aware that many universities these days have a writing component in the curriculum - essentially a class (or two here at Penn) in which the main part of the grade will be a 20-25 page research paper. Those are the classes where you'll start to learn how to work a research library and the standard bibliography of you field.</p>
<p>Finally, consider buying a copy of EndNote (or other bibliographical software) it will make the job of formatting your references much easier, particularly if you have to change formats for different journals (or professors) because that 25 page paper will have 2 or 3 PAGES of bibliography and you don;t want to format them by hand!</p>
<p>In my graduate program, we require first-year students to read <em>The Craft of Research</em>, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, University of Chicago Press, 2003 (2nd ed.).</p>
<p>It is very accessible, and surely would be a valuable tool for undergrads as well.</p>
<p>I'm using RefWorks. This software creates in-text citations and bibliography for you, but you still need to check all of them by yourself after they're created, because the software usually makes errors.
I've never heard of other softwares like EndNote and LaTeX with bibTex besides RefWorks. Are those softwares better than RefWorks?</p>
<p>Well, LaTeX has the following things going for it:</p>
<p>--- it's non-proprietary (free, for one thing)
--- 30 years of Donald Knuth, Leslie Lamport, and others tinkering with LaTeX have left it awesome in essentially every respect
--- in terms of bibliography software, it can do in-text citations for you, there are lots of ways to create any sort of bibliography, and it essentially never makes mistakes.</p>
<p>The downside, of course, is that TeX (and later LaTeX) was designed as a technical typesetting tool back in the day when no-one had a WYSIWYG display. There is a learning curve, shall we say. But if you need what it has to offer, you have no choice, really. </p>
<p>On the other hand...</p>
<p>EndNote, in its EndNote Web incarnation is free if your institution subscribes to ISI Web of Knowledge. EndNote "desktop" is $199. If you use MS Word, EndNote is incredibly easy to use and it includes more than 2000 output styles to match just about any journal you might run across. Fully Unicode compatible as well if you need non-western language support. Don't bother with any version prior to EndNote X even if you happen to see one cheap.</p>