Open a research paper and the first two things you read are the abstract and the introduction. Those few paragraphs decide whether a reviewer stays interested and whether a reader moves on to the rest. Yet many researchers write them too late or too lightly, and students working on their first paper tend to stall on the same questions: What do I write first? Is the introduction just background?
This is Part 5 of CRI's seven-part paper-writing guide. After results and discussion in Part 4, it moves to the front of the paper: when to write the introduction and abstract, how to structure them and how to make them persuasive. Every example comes from one invented study about the ducks on the campus of KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), so you can follow along even if you have never written a paper. The central lesson: even if you write them last, these sections are not an afterthought to squeeze in at the end; they need to be designed deliberately.
What an introduction does
To you, the author, the results may look like the heart of the paper. To an editor, a reviewer or anyone meeting the paper for the first time, the introduction may be all that counts. It works like a trailer, answering three questions:
- Why does this topic matter?
- What is this paper trying to say?
- What has not been solved so far, and what does this paper solve?
If it cannot answer those clearly, readers will struggle to care about anything that follows.
An introduction is not a background section, a summary of earlier studies or a list of statistics. It raises a problem and argues for it, and it has exactly two jobs: convince the reader that the problem matters, and state clearly which question the paper sets out to answer. Do both, and readers decide the paper is worth their time. Reviewers, too, start reading with the right question in mind: why is this research meaningful?
