Writing and Publishing Scientific Articles
4-8
Purpose and Content of the Results Section
The purpose of the Results section is to provide a straightforward account of your findings.
Often, authors make the Results section unnecessarily long and complex by including information there that actually belongs in the Methods section or the Discussion section. To make sure that your Results section is as streamlined and clear as possible, remember the following 2 principles: The methods should not be described in detail in the Results section. The methods are described in the Methods section, so there is no need to describe them in detail in the Results section. However, it is OK — and even useful — to mention the type of experiment, intervention, or analysis performed to obtain the result being reported. For example, “Western blotting revealed that protein levels were higher in A cells than in B cells.” Even if the journal prints the Methods section at the end of the article (rather than before the Results), do not include detailed descriptions of the methods in the Results section. The only information about your methods that you should include in the Results section is the information that is absolutely necessary for the reader to understand your data. The findings should not be interpreted in depth in the Results section. In-depth interpretation should appear in the Discussion section instead. However, it is acceptable to include a little bit of interpretation in the Results section. This can often be accomplished with a phrase or, at most, a sentence: For example, “These results indicated that the improved survival seen in group A was not due to selection bias.” Below are 2 more examples of appropriate interpretation in the Results section. Example 1: In the following long passage, the authors have used interpretive phrases (in bold) that help the reader follow along. These phrases point out a contrasting finding, a result that conflicts with the general pattern of the findings, and an especially interesting finding. Gene Expression Profiles Predict the Aggressive Behavior of Previously Uncharacterized Normal and Tumor-Derived Mammary Epithelial Cells Expression levels for the 24 consensus genes in the cell lines examined relative to the reference cell line MCF10A are shown in Fig. 3B. The gene expression profiles (GEPs) of SUM44PE and SUM52PE resembled the weakly invasive breast cancer (BC) consensus most closely, each having correlation
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