Think of the whole paper as telling a story.

Look at the Results and Discussion: that's where the story needs to go.
Where you need to end up tells you a lot about what the reader needs to know in order to be able to get there.

Then, you structure the introduction in three broad chunks:

(A) is some banal generality about the sub-field you're in. One paragraph of maybe 1–3 sentences. This brings us from cold-open to context.

(B) is the bulk. You introduce the ideas you need to get to the Results and Discussion.
You introduce these ideas as questions. You introduce the basic outline of the field's position on Concept 1 and how it relates to Concept 2. Each time, you note limitations in the literature that the present study addresses or improves on. Concept 3 is backed up by such-and-such, but research is lacking on Sub-Topic Delta, so on and so forth.

(C) Would you look at that! This very paper deals with Concept 3 and Sub-Topic Delta!
This chunk of the introduction is structured differently depending on the study, but generally you would list the hypotheses of the study here. This should be the end of the introduction section, which has spent its entirety building up the question, "With all that said... what are you going to do about it?" and the answer is "this research". This is the part of the intro where you spell out the research in brief, leading into the Methods for details.

Example

Imagine your Discussion cites a concept from (Paper et al).
When writing your Introduction, you might introduce that concept as an open question or area that requires more consideration (which you know your research findings address).

You don't have to mention every idea in the introduction.
You want to give a perspective of the existing literature, but you might introduce novel ideas in the Discussion based on new ideas your Results imply or spark in your mind. You might introduce Sub-Topic Delta in the Introduction because it is well-known, then you can talk about how Sub-Topic Delta relates so Sub-Topic Epsilon, your new idea, in your Discussion.

This story-telling process is entirely different than HARKing.

The purpose of the above technique is not to change what you did or alter your hypotheses. The purpose is to convey your research in a way that can be understood. You provide the most relevant research context rather than supplying superfluous references that are tangentially related. Crucially, you report your hypotheses as they were pre-registered.

Aim for concise, not exhaustive.

Index

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