How can you interpret research results more effectively?

Interpreting research results is crucial for informed decision-making and knowledge advancement. Key steps include understanding the research design, scrutinizing data, grasping statistical analyses, contextualizing findings, acknowledging limitations, considering confounding variables, evaluating interpretations, exploring implications, seeking expert opinions, applying critical thinking, communicating clearly, staying updated with methods, and practicing regularly. These practices enhance the ability to draw meaningful conclusions and contribute to the field.

In my experience, following initial perusal of the abstract, my next step is to delve into the research methods and design. This step allows me to assess the paper's quality before conducting a more in-depth examination of the results.

The results section in a manuscript is the one that conveys the importance of the study, but the collected unprocessed data is raw. A bunch of numbers, quotes from surveys, or images won't provide any insight 😕without a plan for data analysis. When reporting data, it is important to be clear, brief, and accurate. You may need to clean, transform, or integrate the data before you can use it. However, it is always a good idea to collect data and store it in a pre-specified order, as it will enable rapid spotting of missing data points. However, the order of data collection may differ from how it should be presented —logically, and in a sequence that demonstrates the effective testing of the central hypothesis.

If you have 5-6 years to immerse yourself in the literature and theory of a field to a degree where you feel confident comparing an author’s results with the field’s landscape then you will love this AI-generated tip. Also you will end up with a PhD. If you don’t have 5+ years to do your own research (I mean come on what kind of poor work life balance do you even have) then your next best bet is to ask someone who does or at the very least see if there are many papers that replicate the research - then at least you know it might be valid. But honestly this is why you should talk to an expert who understands research and your goals or needs to walk you through what the takeaways are, and actually help you make an impact with them.

Interpretation of results is essential to the research paper, and most young researchers usually ignore this. For a practical understanding, firstly, try to build a corpus of the results you are expecting, and when your research outcomes are similar to the previous, try to explain how your results are essential to the prior theory. Another aspect is that if your research results differ from the literature, try to build an argument based on deductive or inductive reasoning.

First understand numbers. You should know what each test reveals. Once you are clear with the tests, looks for pre and post estimation tests. Once you get correct results, start interpreting your findings with the help of ai, other papers. Relate your findings with others since this will add value to your findings. Your post estimation tests streghthnes the validity of results. Finally, go for robustness check to enhance the reliability of your findings.

Reporting limitations, and challenges with the results generated are so important for transparency, and ensuring, repeatability and reproducibility of the results. Many a times, the limitations are not addressed rightly because that concerns the researcher that it might reflect badly on their credibility. However, its needs to be highlighted, finding or figuring out the limiting factors that influence the results, is also a research, that can help others, in making more informed decisions.

I often to find the “limitations” section within a research article to be extremely telling. That level of transparency is always needed and welcome in my books. Sometimes, the best thing we can say as research scientists “we don’t know” because you can always follow it up with “yet”.

The effectiveness lies in YOU, you will be the bottleneck and the breakthrough. Because with all the methods, processes, it is you who governs even the slightest comprehension of the research results that may makes it eventful, fruitful, meaningful effectively. So understand yourself, your level of understanding, which coupled with standard methodology before bringing yourself over those results that should make sense, and interpret it the way the result constitutes towards your research.

This article is not helpful for most people. Every section asks the reader to do something they don’t know how to do by doing other things they don’t know how to do. Assess the methods by evaluating the methods for accuracy. How do they know what is accurate or how to evaluate? How is this helpful to them? Most people are better off reading research that has been already synthesized in a reputable source like HBR than trying to evaluate it themselves, because academic writing is not accessible. A better question is how do we know what research and data to use in our day to day work?