What is a recommendation section in a report?
Recommendations in research are a crucial component of your discussion section and the conclusion of your thesis, dissertation, or research paper. Show
As you conduct your research and analyze the data you collected, perhaps there are ideas or results that don’t quite fit the scope of your research topic. Or, maybe your results suggest that there are further implications of your results or the causal relationships between previously-studied variables than covered in extant research. NoteRecommendations are generally included both in your conclusion section (briefly) and in your discussion section. However, if your research is more business-oriented or practical in nature, you can also present them in a separate chapter or advisory report.Table of contentsWhat should recommendations look like?Recommendations for future research should be:
Overall, strive to highlight ways other researchers can reproduce or replicate your results to draw further conclusions, and suggest different directions that future research can take, if applicable. Relatedly, when making these recommendations, avoid:
Building your research recommendationThere are many different ways to frame recommendations, but the easiest is perhaps to follow the formula of research question conclusion recommendation. Here’s an example. Recommendation setup exampleResearch questionHow can teachers at your local preschool ensure that social skills that contribute to maintaining peer relationships are promoted in children aged 1 to 4? Conclusion Recommendation Receive feedback on language, structure and formattingProfessional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:
See an example How should your recommendations be written?As a rule of thumb, try to limit yourself to only the most relevant future recommendations: ones that stem directly from your work. While you can have multiple recommendations for each research conclusion, it is also acceptable to have one recommendation that is connected to more than one conclusion. These recommendations should be targeted at your audience, specifically toward peers or colleagues in your field that work on similar subjects to your paper or dissertation topic. They can flow directly from any limitations you found while conducting your work, offering concrete and actionable possibilities for how future research can build on anything that your own work was unable to address at the time of your writing. Recommendation in research exampleSee below for a full research recommendation example that you can use as a template to write your own. Recommendation sectionThe current study can be interpreted as a first step in the research on COPD speech characteristics. However, the results of this study should be treated with caution due to the small sample size and the lack of details regarding the participants’ characteristics. Future research could further examine the differences in speech characteristics between exacerbated COPD patients, stable COPD patients, and healthy controls. It could also contribute to a deeper understanding of the acoustic measurements suitable for e-health measurements. Frequently asked questions about recommendationsCan I present new arguments in the conclusion of my dissertation? While it may be tempting to present new arguments or evidence in your thesis or disseration conclusion, especially if you have a particularly striking argument you’d like to finish your analysis with, you shouldn’t. Theses and dissertations follow a more formal structure than this. All your findings and arguments should be presented in the body of the text (more specifically in the discussion section and results section.) The conclusion is meant to summarize and reflect on the evidence and arguments you have already presented, not introduce new ones. What should I include in a thesis or dissertation conclusion? The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation should include the following:
What doesn’t go in a dissertation conclusion? For a stronger dissertation conclusion, avoid including:
Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work. What’s the difference between the discussion and the conclusion? In a thesis or dissertation, the discussion is an in-depth exploration of the results, going into detail about the meaning of your findings and citing relevant sources to put them in context. The conclusion is more shorter and more general: it concisely answers your main research question and makes recommendations based on your overall findings. Cite this Scribbr articleIf you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.
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