Four questions to ask before writing a research paper

Story

I am a little bit struggling with my research right now. Earlier today, one of my lab seniors shared four questions he uses whenever he sits down to write a paper. They are not new ideas — most of them are things you already “know” — but having them as an explicit checklist before drafting forced me to notice which ones I couldn’t actually answer yet for my own work.

The four questions:

1. Why this research now? What is the urgency of this work? Can it be done later? If yes, why are you choosing to do it now?

2. What is the literature gap? What problem are you trying to address and fix? How is the problem being addressed by other researchers, and where did they fall short?

3. Is your method viable? Is your algorithm economically feasible? Cost effective? Can it be implemented easily in real-life applications? If anyone follows your method, can they reproduce your results? If yes, how?

4. What is the novelty? What is your proposed algorithm, and how does it perform better than others? What is the uniqueness of your model that didn’t exist before — or, if a similar approach existed before, what problems did it have that you solve in your research?

The Takeaway

If I can’t give a clear, honest answer to all four questions before I start writing, the paper isn’t ready to be written yet — what’s incomplete is the research framing, not the draft.