An introduction has four jobs: establish the context, identify a specific gap or problem, position the present study as the answer to that problem, and tell the reader what is coming. Most student introductions do only the first one.
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An introduction is not a warm-up to the real writing. It is an argument that the research question is worth asking, that it hasn't been definitively answered yet, and that this study will answer it in the way described. Most student introductions do only the first move — they establish context — and then jump straight to "this report is organised as follows."
There are four moves, and all four are needed:
Move 1 — Establish a context. Start broadly enough that someone who works in the general area but not the specific sub-area can orient themselves. A study about federated machine learning for intrusion detection would open in the broader context of distributed networks and privacy-preserving computation, not by immediately defining Byzantine fault tolerance.
Move 2 — Identify the gap or problem. After establishing the broad context, narrow progressively until the specific problem becomes visible. "Despite recent advances in federated IDS, existing approaches do not account for heterogeneous non-IID data distributions across client devices, leading to model degradation in realistic enterprise deployments." This is a gap statement: it says what prior work has not solved.
Move 3 — Position the present study. Having named the gap, announce that this study fills it: "This study proposes and evaluates a personalised aggregation strategy that addresses non-IID data distributions across ten simulated enterprise environments." The present study is the answer to the problem named in Move 2.
Move 4 — Announce the study's structure. A brief roadmap of what follows: "Section 2 reviews related work on federated learning and IDS. Section 3 describes the proposed method. Section 4 presents experimental results. Section 5 discusses implications and limitations." This is not a substitute for a table of contents; it is a navigational aid that takes three sentences.
Move 2 is where most student introductions fail. A problem statement is not a background summary. A background summary describes what has been done. A problem statement identifies what has not been resolved, and why that matters.
Weak: "Many studies have examined phishing detection using machine learning."
Stronger: "Existing phishing-detection classifiers trained on static URL features degrade significantly within three to six months of deployment because attackers adapt their URL structures faster than classifiers are retrained, yet no study has measured this decay rate systematically across a defined deployment window."
The stronger version identifies the specific gap (no systematic measurement of decay rate over a defined window), and states why it matters (attackers adapt faster than classifiers retrain). That gap is then what the study promises to close.
Objectives and research questions belong in the introduction, after Move 2 and before Move 4. They make explicit what the study is trying to find out, and they act as a contract with the reader: the results and discussion sections must answer them.
A research question is phrased as a question. "What is the mean accuracy degradation of a phishing URL classifier over a 90-day deployment window, measured against a fresh labelled dataset?" An objective is the same intention phrased as an aim: "To measure the mean accuracy degradation of a phishing URL classifier over a 90-day deployment window."
Both are useful; using both together — stating the objective first, then the question it generates — is common in computing dissertations and reduces the chance of questions drifting in scope as the project develops.
A student's introduction ends as follows: "Cybersecurity is a growing field with many challenges. Phishing attacks are increasingly common. This report will study phishing detection. The report is structured as follows..." Identify which of the four introduction moves are present and which are missing, and rewrite the gap statement to make the specific problem visible.
