Whatever may be the types of research works and studies, one thing that is important is that they all meet on the common ground of scientific method employed by them. One expects that the purpose of the research should be clearly defined and common concepts be used. The research procedure used should be described in sufficient detail to permit another researcher to repeat the research for further advancement, keeping the continuity of what has already been attained. Also, the procedural design of the research should be carefully planned to yield results that are as objectives as possible.
Also, the researcher should report with complete frankness, flaws in procedural design and estimate their effects upon the findings. The analysis of data should be sufficiently adequate to reveal its significance and the methods of analysis used should be appropriate. The validity and reliability of the data should be checked carefully.
Conclusions should be confined to those justified by the data of the research and limited to those for which the data provide an adequate basis.
And lastly, greater confidence in research is warranted if the researcher is experienced, has a good reputation in research and is a person of integrity.
In other words, we can state the qualities of a good research is that its systematic, logical , empirical and replicable.
By systematic, it means that research is structured with specified steps to be taken in a specified sequence in accordance with the well defined set of rules. Systematic characteristic of the research does not rule out creative thinking but it certainly does reject the use of guessing and intuition arriving at conclusions.
By logical, this implies that research is guided by the rules of logical reasoning and the logical process of induction and deduction are of great value in carrying out research. Induction is the process of reasoning from a part to the whole whereas deduction is the process of reasoning from the premise. In fact, logical reasoning makes research more meaningful in the context of decision making.
As for empirical, it implies that research is related basically to one or more aspects of a real situation and deals with concrete data that provides a basis for external validity to research results.
And lastly, good research work is replicable which refers to the characteristic allows research to be verified by replicating the study and thereby building a sound basis for decisions.
As for evaluation, once the research paper passed the criteria given above what is left is to evaluate how the paper is written.
Most of the time when evaluating, panel is brought in to judge a research work. They test your evidences or results of your study, question on your hypothesis and methodology. All of these are already discussed on the criteria given above. What is left now is judging on how your paper was written. The questions below are likely to be used as criteria in this matter.
• Sources: Does the paper use the right kinds of scholarly or popular-scholarly sources to support its claims?
While no number of sources can be called automatically "enough," the assignment requires that you find sources of sufficient quality to support what you say you know about your topic.
• Is the paper based on at least some recent article-length sources?
Articles are the sources of the most recent and most tightly focused analysis on your topic. Students who rely on books because OLLI is easier to use, or because books appear to have "more on the topic," are still thinking at a pre-college level. They do not understand how quickly book-length manuscripts become outdated, and how books' much larger theses can make it difficult for students to extract useful support from them without misunderstanding what they are borrowing. But then nowadays, student rely so much on the Internet and thus results to what we call “copy and paste technology”. This is now done like a common practice but then it should not be done since this is illegal. Even if you credit the authors whose works you are using, it will still be weighed against you seeing that you have not consider revising terms and phrases. If you want your work to be published in top-tier journals, quoting works of others are almost prohibited.
• Does it use at least one scholarly source, or does it contain a well-written endnote or footnote which explains exactly why there are no scholarly sources available on this topic?
You can use popular-scholarly journals and scholarly reference works to give you a "ladder of expertise" so that you can read professional scholars' work.
• If the topic requires it, are the sources recent enough to be persuasive?
Due to the fast changing things nowadays, books/articles/sources becomes outdated quickly. Conclusions based on out of date evidence fail to persuade. Students who want to succeed in these majors must become persistent enough researchers to seek out the most recent and authoritative sources on their topics.
• Thesis:
Is the paper organized by an independent thesis which at least uses reasoning and/or evidence from one article to contribute substantively to the reasoning and/or evidence in any other article, thus avoiding mere summary of the research? Is the thesis carefully composed to avoid claiming absolute knowledge if its evidence supports only possible or probable conclusions? Is the thesis supported by logically sound reasoning?
These questions are asking whether the author has moved beyond the stage of merely reporting what others say, and into the stage of being able to think creatively about the topic. Early attempts to do this may be tentative and uncertain. To protect your reputation for careful thinking, make sure you distinguish clearly among certain, probable, and possible conclusions. Be content to claim your conclusions are "possibly" correct unless you can eliminate many of the contending conclusions to claim they are "probably' correct. Do not claim your conclusions "certainly" explain the evidence unless you have eliminated all alternative explanations. Logical fallacies often arise because writers unconsciously struggle to force their research to support to their earliest intuitions, guesses, hunches, or hypotheses about what is true. (Think of how often you heard high-school writers say "I'm going to do some research to get sources that support my thesis.") Beware your own prejudices about what you think the evidence will reveal before you've impartially examined it. Let the evidence speak and you can hardly go far wrong.
• Audience:
Does the paper address a scholarly audience and correctly estimate the level of knowledge that audience can be expected to possess? Does it avoid telling experts obvious things, like defining terms of art or basic concepts, providing needless "background," and identifying experts to each other with unnecessary specificity (e.g., "the biologist Lewis Thomas" in a paper addressed to biologists)? Does it always specify the source of generalizations about evidence by correct citations of scholarship?
• Mechanics and Documentation:
Does the paper use standard academic English usage and sentence construction, coherent and well-ordered paragraphs, logical paragraph transition, and a fully functional title, introduction, and conclusion? Does the paper accurately and consistently use a documentation style appropriate to the discipline (MLA, APA, CBE, or U. Chicago), or does it at least use MLA style accurately and consistently? Does it have the proper style, conventions, and organization of words, facts, and subjects? Is too much jargon used that the study can not be understood by its selected audience?
Failure to write grammatically when making a scholarly claim automatically exposes the writer to suspicion that the basic thinking underlying the paper is faulty, too. This is especially difficult for student writers because when the mind must concentrate on difficult, newly learned concepts and methods, grammar and syntax almost always deteriorate. Be especially careful when using terms of art and jargon from the discipline you're just entering. As an "apprentice," you may make mistakes that a more experienced scholar would not make, and they're the kind of mistakes that damage your authority, so you should pay special attention to those peculiar kinds of words and phrases. Double your efforts to proofread your final draft in order to catch these old errors that will come back when you least want them to appear. You can prevent one typical source of dangerous errors if you start your paper's first draft with a list of sources as you accumulate them in your research, properly formatted in the documentation style appropriate for your topic's discipline. This is far to important to leave for the last five minutes of the writing process, and if you develop the habit of doing it early you will save yourself countless disappointments in later papers. Just build the paper on top of that source list, and add to it every time you develop a new source, and you can spend your last hours polishing your prose rather than worrying about documentation format.
One you passed all these criteria then your research work is deemed of praise and recognition.
credits to:
http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng105sanders/research_paper_evaluation_criter.htm
http://www.reportbd.com/articles/57/1/Criteria-Qualities-of-Good-Scientific-Research/Page1.html
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