Writing and Publishing Scientific Articles
5-14
Introducing Speculation in the Discussion
When you state your conclusions, why filling the gap is important, and how your results may change scientific thought or medical practice, you may be tempted to speculate about implications that your current data do not support. Speculation is the formation of new hypotheses. Sometimes journal reviewers and readers disapprove of speculation, but often that is because the writer has not made it clear that the speculation is a hypothesis rather than a conclusion. How much can you speculate about your findings? Assuming you have firm data for your conclusions, it is probably all right to speculate 1 step further to another, more long- ranging conclusion.
Following are 2 examples in which the authors add phrases or sentences that indicate that the ideas are speculations, not conclusions:
On the basis of our data, we conclude that overexpression of protein ABC in tumors from patients with disease XYZ is associated with a decreased survival rate. We further speculate that ABC is involved in the initiation of XYZ.
Given our results, it is likely that ABC is involved in the initiation of XYZ. However, this hypothesis needs to be tested .
Speculation can also be a way of introducing what you will do next. It is useful to mention the next step: it shows you are thinking ahead in your research plan. For example: Our findings suggest that ABC is a predictor of response to chemotherapy with XYZ in patients with breast cancer. The next step is to study the relationship between ABC level and response to XYZ in a clinical trial.
If you are actually doing the next step, say so, to let your competitors know you have a head start:
The results of our study imply that bone growth is slowed by this gene, but this must be tested in other experiments. These experiments are under way in our laboratory .
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