Considering the implications of your results

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2020. Considering the implications of your results. https://www.worldts.com/english-writing/eigo-ronbun76/index.html

One key goal in the Discussion section of a paper is to discuss the implications of what you learned from your research. (Implications are both the direct and the indirect consequences of using your knowledge.) Research results have implications both for your field of research and for the world that lies outside of that field. If you set out to solve a problem in your research, and succeed, the positive implications are clear: you have solved the problem. But not all implications relate to science and not all are beneficial. Research problems occur within a broader context (e.g., human society, the global environment), and you can’t ignore the wider consequences of your results for society and the world, particularly for potentially negative consequences.

When you write the Discussion, spend some time towards the end of that section considering what areas other than your field of science will be affected by your results. For beneficial effects, provide recommendations on how to achieve those benefits. For negative effects, provide suggestions on how to avoid those effects or, if they cannot be avoided, how to shift the consequences more towards the good end of the spectrum and away from the negative end of the spectrum (i.e., to mitigate the consequences).

There are several categories of implications you should consider:

• Scientific

• Methodological

• Economic

• Ethical

• Social

• Political

• Future research

Some of these categories of implications may not be relevant for a given research project. The more narrowly focused your paper is on some aspect of science, the fewer of these categories will be relevant. For example, a field study of the effects of climate change on human society will probably have implications in all of these categories, whereas a lab study designed to improve a specific analytical method may have primarily methodological implications. The more interdisciplinary your research is, and the more it exists within a human social context, the more categories will be relevant. Also note that some of these categories overlap. The important point about this list is to take a moment to consider whethereach category is relevant, not to find ways to include all of these categories in every paper that you write.

Scientific implications are usually the most obvious, since they relate directly to your research questions. Those questions define what problems you hoped to solve or were forced to solve to complete your research, and what specific knowledge you hoped to contribute to your field of research: knowledge where knowledge was formerly lacking, confirmation of previous research (either as replication of an older study or as repetition of an older study in a new context), new methods, improvements of old methods, evidence or knowledge that complements or builds on or contradicts previous knowledge, and so on. In short, any way that your new knowledge will affect the overall understanding of some aspect of your field or guide future research represents an implication for science.

Methodological implications include any innovations you developed to help you do your research faster, more accurately, or less expensively (thereby making the method usable in more studies). These implications also include problems you were not able to solve and that must be solved in future research. For example, if your sample size proved to be too small because you found high variation in your study system, this may have led to weak or non-significant results. Stating this explicitly will help future researchers avoid that problem and do better research by increasing their sample size.

Economic implications relate most obviously to monetary issues. Less obviously, they relate to how new knowledge will guide the operation of economic systems, which go far beyond flows of money to include flows of resources and energy within human systems such as cities. (Consider, for example, the field of economic ecology.) In monetary terms, the implications include the question of whether the cost of your research can be justified by the results, which means that they can be justified by the economic benefits provided by your research (e.g., improved livelihoods, decreased costs, increased profits, reduced ecological damage). In terms of flows of energy and materials, your new knowledge can provide insights into better ways to achieve sustainable development without excessive cost to human economies, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or to reduce pollution outputs.

Ethical implications consider the consequences in terms of their effect on humans or on the thing you studied. It’s often said that science is ethically neutral, and although that’s true to a large extent, the consequences of applying that science are not always neutral. If your results show us how to save lives, restore ecosystems, or reduce the pain or suffering of humans and lab animals, they have clear beneficial ethical implications. But in a world where people are dying of preventable diseases and living in poverty and starvation, it’s also worth asking yourself whether you could redirect your research in a way that would help solve some of those problems.

Social implications relate to how humans interact with their institutions (e.g., government, religion) and with other humans within a society. Research that relates to technology (i.e., to applied science) has the clearest social implications. For example, if you’re working on better image recognition algorithms, ask yourself whether and how those algorithms could be misapplied to adversely affect people, particularly people in groups that have traditionally been feared or distrusted or discriminated against by the dominant society. If your knowledge could lead to changes in how a social institution operates, consider whether those changes are desirable, and explain any precautions that should be taken to prevent undesirable changes.

Political implications relate to the effects of scientific research on how governments develop and implement policies related to humans, the environment, and science itself. For science that will support government policy, carefully consider the effects of your new knowledge for the physical and biological world and for human institutions. For example, many ecological restoration programs are eagerly adopted by governments based on their ability to restore a degraded ecosystem, but without considering the impacts of the programs on people who live in the areas affected by the programs. This often happens when a government establishes a nature reserve in an area where traditional hunter–gatherers live. These people may no longer be allowed to live in the reserve once it has been established. In such contexts, it’s necessary to develop solutions that both restore the environment and find alternative livelihoods for the people who lose their employment once the program is implemented.

In most journals, it’s traditional to conclude your paper with suggestions for future research. In terms of what comes next in your research plan, consider what questions your results raised. It’s a truism that research generally leads to new questions rather than to final answers, which is one reason why research is such a fascinating profession. What questions was your study unable to answer that should still be answered? What do we still not fully understand? Propose testable explanations (i.e., hypotheses) based on your new understanding of your study system, and inspire other researchers to test those hypotheses—or to work with you to test them!

Also describe the limitations of your research by carefully constraining your results. Are your results preliminary, or definitive? What situations do they apply to and not apply to? If you performed a sensitivity analysis, how vulnerable are your results to flaws in your assumptions about parameter values and other factors that affect the results? Are the assumptions valid, in general terms, or do they require more research to obtain better assumptions and more reliable results? Are your results plausible and realistic? If they have statistical significance, do they also have practical (real-world) significance?

Some of the examples I listed could be legitimately classified into two categories. For example, the establishment of nature reserves has both political implications (the need to find alternative livelihoods for people displaced by the reserve) and ethical implications (the disruption of a traditional society that may have existed in the reserve area for thousands of years). In those cases, it’s necessary to examine the tradeoffs between the beneficial and negative consequences to see if a compromise can be found. For example, the traditional inhabitants could be employed to protect the land where they live, to provide ecotourism opportunities, or even to continue their traditional activities without interference; often, their activities have preserved the ecosystem, and it is the activities by outsiders that are the true problem.

Even the most abstract, purely scientific research is performed within a specific context, whether that context is scientific or social. Understanding this wider context enriches your research and makes it valuable to a wider range of potential readers.