[Tharkun]

Possibly slightly off topic: not ever having been in academia, how would one go about "writing a paper"? I assume you start off by researching something interesting and jotting down your results, but I'm guessing there's a little more to it than that. Are there any resources that could help one get started with this?

[sjg007]

Yes, you would also read some research papers relevant to your work and cite them in your paper. So typically intro, hypothesis, experiments, results, conclusions/next steps.

[p1esk]

You just read other papers, find the ones you like, then try writing something similar in novelty, usefulness, layout and style.