How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Content of the results
How to write the results
Preparing the text

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.

—Thomas A. Edison

Content of the results

So now we come to the core of a paper—the data. This part of the paper is called the results section.

Contrary to popular belief, you shouldn’t start the results section by describing methods that you inadvertently omitted from the materials and methods section. The results section usually has two ingredients. First, you should give some kind of overall description of the experiments, providing the big picture without repeating the experimental details previously provided in materials and methods. Second, you should present the data. Your results should be presented in the past tense. (See the section “Tense in Scientific Writing” in Chapter 30.)

Of course, it isn’t quite that easy. How do you present the data? A simple transfer of data from laboratory notebook to manuscript will hardly do.

As elsewhere in a scientific paper, good organization is crucial. Chronological organization often works well. So does topic-by-topic organization, with headings parallel to those in the methods section (if any). Another option is to present the most important results first, followed by results of decreasing importance. In some fields, and for some types of studies, conventions exist as to which types of results to present in which order. Consult any guidelines from the journal or elsewhere, perhaps see how results were reported in articles on research similar to yours, and consider in what order you could most logically present your results.

Importantly, in the manuscript you should present representative data rather than endlessly repetitive data. The fact that you could perform the same experiment 100 times without significant divergence in results might be of considerable interest to your professor, but editors, not to mention readers, prefer a little bit of predigestion. Aaronson (1977, p. 10) said it another way: “The compulsion to include everything, leaving nothing out, does not prove that one has unlimited information; it proves that one lacks discrimination.” Exactly the same concept, and it is an important one, was stated almost a century earlier by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1888. In Powell’s words: “The fool collects facts; the wise man selects them.”