ENL 264: Communicating in the Sciences

A typical scientific article has the following sections:

Introduction: 

• reviews the topic being studied
• summarizes research that has previously been done (a literature review)
• states the hypothesis or what the authors are testing in the study in this paper

Methods:

• describes how the study or experiment was set up
• describes how data was collected, what data was collected, and how the data was analyzed

Results:

• presents the analyzed data
• usually contains tables, graphs, charts and other displays illustrating the data

Discussion:

• highlights and explains the results
• comments on whether or not the data support the original hypothesis
• sometimes will suggest possibilities for future study