As part of my teaching allocation, I also supervise a number of MBA dissertations/capstone projects each year. These projects typically use a somewhat different approach than I would in my own research - never experiments, occasionally something with a questionnaire, more often something with existing data or some form of a thematic/systematic literature review - but they are supposed to be proper research projects.
A big part of this supervising process is providing feedback on things the students have written. That normally starts with a research proposal, generally followed by the introductory chapter a bit later and a literature review a little bit later still. The next step is usually, more often than not nerve-wreckingly close to the final submission date, a full version of the paper with the methodology, results and conclusion/discussion sections in one go.
This seems like a logical way of writing a research paper: start at the beginning and work your way to the end in a linear fashion. I am going to argue that it is better to start with your methods section and work, as it were, from the inside out.
Now, the methods section is obviously not where the work starts. You begin with an idea and some potential questions and a lot of reading. Read everything you can find (well, as much as possible) on your topic. And obviously you make notes and you will find that some findings from the literature hang together so your notes may have some rough structure and maybe you write a paragraph here and there summarizing your findings but you're not writing your literature review just yet. This is just the work you need to get done to formulate your research questions and to figure out the right research approach. Only when you’ve settled on your research design, the exact way in which you are going to provide an answer to your research questions, and, ideally, have done the actual research and you’ve run the numbers, are you really ready to start writing.
Your methodology section is the heart of your paper. It’s a research project so the research design is the thing everything else revolves around. Obviously, it leads into your results section (which I would write next, if I were you). But it also determines what should go into your literature review and subsequently how you write your introduction. Your design determines the topics that you should cover in the literature review and writing up your design first will make it easier to make sure you don’t miss anything out or, the other way around, cover irrelevant topics.
A very basic example. Let's say you want to study the relationship between leadership styles and how innovative a firm is. The linear way would be to write a literature review where you cover the existing literature on leadership styles, the existing literature on innovation and, if it exists, any literature looking at the effect of leadership styles on innovation. Seems reasonable enough. You're especially proud of the bit where you explain, in great detail, the differences between leadership styles A, B, C and D. But what if, when you start doing the actual research, it turns out that you can only find data on innovation for firms using leadership styles A and D? You've wasted about half your time - and wordcount - on something that is largely irrelevant to your research, leadership styles B and C.
Now this is obviously not the end of the world. Nobody is really harmed by having some additional, if irrelevant, information in their research paper. But if you care about making your paper as clear as possible, and value the reader enough that you don't want to waste their time, it would be better if your literature review only covered material that is directly relevant for understanding your research questions and how you are going to answer them. Explicitly formulating your research design, and writing it down, will basically turn it into a handy compact to do list, setting out all the elements you need to cover in the literature review so that the reader has all the necessary knowledge (and isn't confused by any inessential diversions). I'm not saying you can't write a good introduction/literature review by starting at the beginning. I am saying that it is easier to do so if you have written the methods section first.
And it isn’t just that it helps structuring your literature review by writing your methods section first. It’s also a good idea to wait with writing your introduction chapter until the end. In your introduction chapter you should basically provide a bit of a summary of the rest of the paper - why your questions are interesting, how you will be going about answering them, some quick highlights of your findings - and it’s much easier to write that if you’ve already written the rest.
A second reason to start writing with your methods section, is that writing is hard. Especially writing the first chapter, the first paragraph, the first sentence of your paper. You have all these ideas in your head and now you have to condense all of that into one sentence, one paragraph that presents these ideas, shows why they're important, grabs the reader and makes them want to read on. That's difficult. The danger is that, if you start at the very beginning, with all that weight on your shoulder, you get overwhelmed and just sit there staring at an empty page waiting for inspiration. Writing the methods section is much easier. All the thinking is already done. It's just description. Just write up what you've done. It should be relatively easy to get started and, also not unimportant, to finish. And once you've written your methods section, your research paper is already taking shape. It's not just an idea in your head anymore but it's a couple of pages with a couple of hundreds of words. I'm not saying writing the rest is going to be a walk in the park but at least it's not a blank page anymore. And you have something to write towards. That should make writing the rest easier.
I promise that by starting writing your research paper by writing the methods section first will help you write a better research paper. It is not a magic bullet, writing up a research project will always be arduous and difficult for most of us, but writing the methods section first will create focus and direction which should lead to a better structured end result. Write your methods section first, followed by the results, only then do the literature review and end with the discussion/conclusion and your introduction. Counterintuitively, writing up your paper in the ‘wrong’ order should make it easier for you and help make it read smoother for the reader.
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