445-446, Perrin Research essays and reports are not generically different from other types of college and university writing. The English word research derives from the French chercher, to search, and from the Latin cicare, to circle around, explore. Searching, circling around, and exploring are activities that can be important to any writing that you do. The paper is a synthesis of your interpretation and evaluation of the information you discover, with complete documentation of where these discoveries came from. It is not a summary of an article or book or a collection of summaries of articles or books.
Some research questions lead to a final, definitive answer.
Some do not, especially when an assignment asks you to take a position about a debatable topic and argue for that position in your paper. Your role in writing a research paper will depend on whether you are called upon mainly to report, to interpret, or to analyze sources. As the examples indicate, reporting generally serves an explanatory purpose, while interpreting and analysing may serve either an explanatory or a persuasive purpose. The three operations are not exclusive. In time, you will come to understand that knowledge is not always something conveyed by experts in books and articles to novice writers who merely copy the ideas of the experts onto the pages of their research papers.