Effective writing and publishing scientific papers, part V: Results

摘要

1. What you should know The results section of an article presents a clear, concise, and objective description of the findings from a particular study and is mostly written in the past tense. The findings are presented without interpretation, as this should occur in the discussion section only. You may think of the results section as mirroring the methods section: For every method (what you did), there should be a corresponding result (what you found) and vice versa. A common order of elements is: recruitment/response, characteristics of the sample, findings from the primary analyses, secondary analyses, and any additional (unexpected) findings. Ideally, the results section is a dynamic interplay between text and figures/tables; the most important data will be shown in both. Tables and figures are particularly useful to present larger quantities of data (see part 7 of this series on "Tables and figures"). The word "significant" is often used in everyday language to stress something that is important or substantial, but in a scholarly article, it is probably better to use the words "statistically significant" if you want to report a difference proven by a statistical test. Although the reporting of P-values is very common in the medical literature, interpretation of findings based solely on P- values can be misleading and is therefore discouraged. The 95% confidence interval not only contains the information from P-values but also additionally shows the direction of the treatment effect (whether toward harm or benefit), the size of the effect estimate, and its degree of precision.