Question of the day: when writing a paper, do you prefer journals with Results separate from Discussion, or a combined Results & Discussion section?
I prefer the latter. First, because it seems more natural to me to highlight the significance of a result as soon as it has been stated. To illustrate, imagine stating that "I found that 2 + 2 = 4" then, some pages later in Discussion, stating that "the finding that 2 + 2 = 4, some pages ago, is interesting as it implies that 1 + 1 = 2". Not natural is it?
Second, I feel that separating Results from Discussion is one of those little tricks that we use in papers with the purpose of making our work sound more original than it is. In the mind of the reader, it creates a boundary between the result and its significance. To illustrate, let's say you have discovered that a certain amino acid X occurs with frequency Y at position Z. Let's also say that this is not a new finding, but it is relevant to your argument. So in Results, you say "it was found that amino acid X occurs with frequency Y at position Z". Wow! However, later on in Discussion, you point out that "the finding that amino acid X occurs with frequency Y at position Z corroborates the work of Other Mad Scientist et al." Mmm, suddenly not so original. It seems to me that baldly stating the fact out of context in Results is one of those little "lies of science".
This inspired me to go in search of Peter Medawar's classic essay "Is The Scientific Paper A Fraud?" (PDF), from way back when. He makes a similar point:
The section called `results' consists of a stream of factual information in which it's considered extremely bad form to discuss the significance of the results you're getting. You have to pretend that your mind is, so to speak, a virgin receptacle, an empty vessel, for information which floods into it from the external world for no reason which you yourself have revealed. You reserve all appraisal of the scientific evidence until the `discussion' section...
Comments
At the risk of sounding obvio
At the risk of sounding obvious I would suggest using the method which facilitates the clearest communication of your ideas. I think scientific communication in general is too fluid to enforce a one-size-fits-all approach.
I agree that results separate from discussion to tend to generate those "little lies of science", however this format may allow the reader to draw their own conclusions from the results before the author enters into her discussion. Whereas in combined results discussion the author has more of an opportunity to lead the reader to their conclusion. Maybe...
Being realistic, it all depends on the Journal's author guidelines and your reviewers' comments :)
Agreed. The 'classical approa
Agreed. The 'classical approach' I was taught was that if there is a separation of the two sections, then low level discussion (of the type: agrees with M.O. Scientist et al) goes into the results section; the discussion/conclusion is reserved for a higher level, perhaps open ended commentary of the work as a whole (read: pimping your work as The Next Best Thing (TM) ).
I personally am inclined to the short(er), more integrated paper. You would have thought that years of education would have equipped you to write something with a little more structure and finesse than the one-idea-per-paragraph monstrosities that litter the literature (geddit?).
To this end, I would suggest reading some of the great scientific writers of the past few decades: Monod, Russell, Gould, Dawkins, Pinker, Diamond, Dennett, Blackmore, Medawar, and Wilson spring to mind in no particular order. The trick here is that all these authors have tried - and usually succeeded - in presenting difficult and subtle concepts clearly, concisely, with apposite use of metaphor. If they can do it for entire swathes of scientific thought, surely the rest of us can do it for one experiment?
Keeping the results and the d
Keeping the results and the discussions separate makes a lot sense for experimental work that is aimed to prove or disprove a hypothesis. For high-throughput studies, the format does not seem to work any more already, as many hypotheses can be generated from a single data source. Usually, they remain hypotheses in the context of the paper anyway.
In real bioinformatics work - the introduction of a new algorithm or the analysis of an existing data set - the separation, in fact the whole format - is unsuited. It might be interesting to think about better formats for publishing such work. Even the journal Bioinformatics does not really offer a fitting format.
i agree with most of this ...
i agree with most of this ... one thing we usually do to get around this:
we tend to state both of these in the Results and try on the latter to expand in the Discussion ... but, i agree, an all-in-one results & discusson just works better for everyone -- and probably reduces the length of the paper.