How to Write the Discussion of Papers: 14 Essential Tips
In my previous article, I wrote about how to write the results section of papers. Now in this post, I will touch on one of the most challenging section of research papers: developing the discussion section.
The discussion take the data reported in the Results section and interprets the findings, evaluates their significance, and examines the implications. The following suggestions are essential tips for developing the Discussion:
1. Begin the discussion with a topic sentence that returns to the question raised in the Introduction section.
2. Mention new findings, knowledge, and concepts that resulted from your study. Do not, however, introduce data that were not presented in the Results section.
3. State whether you have achieved your goal of answering the research question or have found exceptions and unexplained results.
4. Compare your results and interpretations with related published work, even though it may disagree with yours. Give due credit to others whose work has been confirmed. Be fair with those whose results differs from yours and explain, if possible, the disagreement impartially.
5. Take care to label speculations as such. Journals permit some reasonable speculations if based on solid evidence.
6. Discuss any theoretical implications and possible applications of your findings.
7. Present the conclusions concisely. If additional experiments are needed to validate your results, be sure to qualify your conclusions.
8. Suggest future study, if any.
9. End your discussion with a short summary or conclusion.
10. Do not repeat material that was presented in others sections of the paper. This is common occurrence in papers but should be avoided.
11. Use past tense to describe past events that took place during the project. These include procedures and observations. For examples:
- Data were taken from fifty volunteers
- The distribution followed a standard bell-curve
12. Use the present tense to describe interpretations, conclusions, and implications because they represent your current beliefs. Example: We conclude that regular exercise reduces the severity of osteoporosis.
13. Use the past perfect tense to indicate that an action was completed prior to the time frame of reference, i.e., before your research project started. Example: Bruman had studied the secondary structure of potein A by the sequence-predictive method in 1985.
14. Use the present perfect tense to indicate that an action was completed either in the present, or at that is unknown or unimportant. Example: The confirmation of protein B has been studied by NMR (Brunman, 1990).