Members of a discourse community who aim to transmit their findings and conclusions should respect commonly agreed standards. For example, “Research Papers (R.P.) and Research Articles (R.A.) are composed of several parts: title, abstract, acknowledgements, introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussions, recommendations, references, and appendixes.” (Pintos and Crimi, 2010, p.27) Beckett, Peters, Fletcher, Staessen, Liu, Dumitrascu, et al. (2008) included four main sections in their publication: An abstract which briefly summarizes the main parts of the whole article, methods, results and discussion. Moreover, an appendix including committee members and investigators and the references list are included at the end of the publication. The following analysis will focus on the results section, which is supposed to present “the main findings of the research but it does not interpret their meanings.” (Pintos and Crimi, 2010, p.18)
Swales (1998, cited in Pintos and Crimi, 2010) suggests that the results section should outline the collected information by means of text, and/or figures and should follow the same order as the methods section does. There is a short account of the origin of the participants, who are called patients throughout the article since they are part of an investigation about treatment of hypertension. A detailed description of both, the way in which the research was done and a summary of the data which were collected after each step illustrates the outcomes. According to some characteristics, most researchers accept, the process is supposed to be developed in the methods section (Pintos and Crimi, 2010a). Thus, this article may not strictly follow what theory on research writing states for the results section because it includes details about the origin and age of the participants.
Understandable data are acquainted through the introduction of figures and charts. Figure 1 is a flow chart (Beckett, et al., 2008) and Figure 2 (Beckett, et al., 2008) and Figure 3 (Beckett, et al., 2008) are two line graphs which make the complex procedures and results readable since they “supplement the information presented in the body of the paper.” (Pintos and Crimi, 2010b, p.28) Both figures are properly numbered and have a title with a legend and a caption. In Table 1 (Beckett, et al., 2008) and Table 2 (Beckett, et al., 2008) every column has a column heading and concise definitions of the terms used in each table are explained below it. Conversely, these tables do not follow APA guidelines (2007, cited in Pintos and Crimi, 2010b) because their title is not italicized and columns do not report comparable values down all rows.
All in all, the investigation results and obtained data appear to be neatly arranged in charts, graphs and tables. Furthermore, conclusions for some steps of the process are summarized so that the reader can easily follow the development of the research study. Conventions are mainly respected and the use of suitable lexis and passive voice contribute to provide the publication the necessary requirements to belong to the literature available for the discourse community in the field of medicine.
References
Beckett, N. S., Peters, R., Fletcher, A. E., Staessen, J.A., Liu, L., Dumitrascu, D., et al. (2008). Treatment of hypertension in patients 80 years of age or older. The New England Journal of Medicine 358 (18), 1887/1898. Retrieved May 19, 2010 from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=5754
Pintos, V., & Crimi, Y. (2010a). Lengua Inglesa Especializada II. Unidad 2. Buenos Aires. Universidad CAECE. Retrieved April 3, 2010, from
http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=4691
Pintos, V., & Crimi, Y. (2010b). Lengua Inglesa Especializada II. Unidad 3. Buenos Aires. Universidad CAECE. Retrieved April 25, 2010, from
http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=4692
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