This is one of the more challenging questions people have ever asked me, because after looking through dozens of journal articles in my Mendeley database, i possibly could not find many of them who used Discussion sections. In my opinion this notion of the Discussion component of an journal that is academic (or book chapter, in many cases) comes from the IMRAD type of publishing, that is, papers which have at the least the following five sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, Analysis and Discussion (hence the acronym).
Personally, I neither like, nor do I often write this kind of journal article. Even when I became a chemical engineer, I can’t recall as they all had a variation (merging Discussion with Results, or Results with Conclusion, or Discussion with Conclusion) that I read many papers in the IMRAD model,. As I said on Twitter, I read engineering, natural science and social science literatures. Thusly, the Discussion sections that I read vary QUITE A BIT.
All Discussion sections I’ve read are
- analytical, not descriptive,
- specific in their interpretation of research results,
- robust inside their linkage of research findings with theories, other empirical reports and various literatures,
- good at explaining how a paper’s results may contradict earlier work, extend it, advance our understanding of X or Y phenomenon and, most definitely:
- NOT the final outcome associated with the paper.
What I think is important to keep in mind when writing the Discussion area of a paper, would be to really ANALYZE, not describe just. Link theories, methods, data, other work.
My post on the difference between analysis and description should help you write Discussion sections. https://t.co/oxz8uIY3Pd you should all read Graf and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say https://t.co/yDXHawbez1 as preparation to create Discussions – for the moves that are rhetorical.
As always during my blog posts, I here connect to a resources that are few may be of help (authored by other authors).
- Dr. Pat Thomson, as always providing advice that is great Results/Discussion sections of journal articles.
- A handy handout on what gets into each one of the IMRAD sections.
- Note how this informative article by Sollaci and Pereira on 50 years of IMRAD articles won’t have a Conclusion section (oh, the irony!). However, their Discussion section is quite nice, albeit brief.
- This short article by Hцfler et al offers good advice on integrating substantive knowledge with results to create a discussion section that is solid.
- In this specific article, Цner Sanli and coauthors provide great suggestions on just how to write a Discussion portion of a journal article.
In my Twitter thread, I suggested methods to discern (and learned from) how authors have written their discussion sections.
If you now see the Discussion section, you will see that during my yellow highlights, i have noted how this particular article contributes towards the literature. This might be section of what should go when you look at the Discussion section. A lot more than explaining results, how your results url to broader debates. pic.twitter.com/a19hE5FB9d
Discussion sections are particularly found in articles that follow the IMRAD model https://t.co/FzunG4tnce I love this charged power Point on which should go in each one of the IMRAD sections https://t.co/SQLVLsD6JB – what I’ve found essay writer is that often times, Discussion sections are blended/morphed
There are occasions when scholars blend Discussion and Conclusions, or Results and Discussions sections. This is not even discipline-dependent, it is author-dependent.
The discussion section is blended with the results for example, in this # Free2DownloadAndRead World Development article. https://t.co/cgB82kYXla This really is common, and I also personally don’t have any objection to carrying this out. As for PhD discussion and dissertation chapters: this really is challenging
Another example, now from the justice field that is criminal.
That they bring back their empirical results to the broader debates if you notice how these authors start their Discussion section, you’ll see. That’s what I have observed in most Discussion sections of journal articles (in engineering, public health insurance and some pysch). pic.twitter.com/wpH9jGghjk