academic research manual

Description

This research manual was edited by the academic staff of Uganda Christian University to help students prepare Research Reports, Project Reports, Research Papers, Proposals, Dissertations and Theses. The purpose of the research manual is to facilitate academic research activities in Uganda Christian University for both Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes. It is intended to encourage students to produce research that is comprehensive, thorough and academically sound. The developers of this research manual would like to thank Professor Mike Bendixon for permitting us to borrow liberally from the research guide that he developed for use at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. An academic writing can be either empirical or non-empirical. While empirical writing is primary data based, non-empirical research may not require primary data. Each of the two categories may have its own formats but can be similar in many respects. As a general guide to academic writing at Uganda Christian University, this manual is tilted towards the empirical paper format. We also recognise that while some people believe that literature review and methodology should be a major subsection under the introduction chapter, some do believe each of them shall be separate chapters. While keeping literature review and methodology as distinctive chapters is proposed in this manual, we require faculties with different traditions to document and we append them to this guide. While we propose that the proposal shall have three chapters and the final research output five or six chapters, there may be variations depending on the nature of the research. The uniqueness of the nature of the research will require separate a written guide to proposal format and assessment. The faculty of Theology has documented some of the uniqueness of their research and is shown in Appendix 7.4.1. As advised by the Vice Chancellor this document shall be treated as a "living document".