Guide to Scientific WritingResults
Statistical Significance
All statistics should be reported in the text with their calculated values, degrees of freedom, and significance (“p-value”) indicated, either parenthetically or as a table. For example:
“In our population of spotted newts, those with long legs showed significantly higher survival than those with short legs (Χ2 = 6.15, df = 1, p < 0.05).”
If your results did not show a significant difference, you can report them like this:
“In our population of spotted newts, those with long legs did not show significantly higher survival than those with short legs (Χ2 = 0.16, df = 1, NS).
The NS stands for “not significant”. You may think that a reader would not want to know that, but remember that you are testing a hypothesis. Non-significant results can still be applied to the question you are testing.
If you have multiple tests on which you performed statistics, sometimes it is more helpful to present them in a table:
Variable |
X2 |
d.f. |
p-value |
|---|---|---|---|
Leg Length |
6.15 |
1 |
p<0.05* |
Tail Length |
8.23 |
1 |
p<0.01* |
Body Length |
0.16 |
1 |
NS |
Table I. The effects of leg, tail, and body length on survival of spotted newts. *Indicates a statistically significant difference.