Are academic papers required to have specific sections I've seen that academic papers tend to have the sections Abstract, Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Acknowledgements, and Literature Cited.  My question is if I wanted to publish an academic paper would it need to have these specific sections or could I have a different set of sections from the ones mentioned depending on the contents of my paper?
That depends on where you want to publish. Some journals are strict on requiring a specific structure, e.g. IMRAD, or on the naming of sections, while others are more freeform. As a general rule, read any &quot;Guide to authors&quot;/&quot;Author information&quot; or just try to follow the structure used in recent papers published in the venue of interest.