Eli5 What do I say about insignificant results in a biology research report?

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All my results turned out to be insignificant.

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You say exactly that. You had a hypothesis, you tested it, the results were insignificant. So either your experiment wasn’t right for the hypothesis or the hypothesis was wrong. Either outcome is still useful information. If the former, you can and should explain what you did and why and what should be changed in the next experiment to make it better. If the latter, you’ve eliminated at least one potential explanation for the hypothesis and narrowed the search for the right explanation. This is still progress!

This is a huge problem in science publishing (and some kinds of engineering)…people only want to publish successful results. But unsuccessful results can often be far more informative and are just as valuable.

Anonymous 0 Comments

At what kind of level are you writing this report?

(ELI5 might not be the most appropriate sub for this)