Back to: Report Your Findings

When you’re writing the results section, it’s your job to highlight and describe the most important aspects of your findings. But often, authors merely introduce a set of data and expect readers to interpret it for themselves.

How often have you seen a researcher write something like this:

Table 2 shows the demographic and clinical characteristics of the sample.

This sentence says nothing about the results of your research. It just introduces the title of table 2. In some cases, you could start a paragraph with this sentence to introduce a table, but you can’t stop there. Follow up by summarizing the important results in the table. Then, refer to the table that contains that data. For example:

Almost 90% of patients were smokers; two-thirds of tumors were in the glottic larynx and one-third in the supraglottic larynx (Table 2).