What doesn’t belong in your result section?
It’s important to provide a complete picture of your data analyses and outcomes in a concise way. For that reason, raw data and any interpretations of your results are not included in the results section.
- Raw data:
It’s rarely appropriate to include raw data in your results section. Instead, you ought to always save the data securely and make them available and accessible to the other researchers who request them.
Making research project available to others may be a key a part of academic integrity and open science.
- Interpretation or discussion of results:
This belongs in your discussion section. Your results section is where you objectively report all relevant findings and leave them open for interpretation by readers.
While you ought to state whether the findings of statistical tests lend support to your hypotheses, refrain from forming conclusions to your research questions within the results section.
- Explanation of how statistics tests work:
For the sake of concise writing, you’ll safely assume that readers of your paper have professional knowledge of how statistical inferences work.
- Explanation of formula: