Page 170 - English for Writing Research Papers

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8.16 Convince readers to believe your interpretation
of your data

Data can often be interpreted in more than one way. One reason for a paper being
initially rejected is that the referee may interpret your data in a different way from
how you have interpreted your data. The referee may then request that you to do
further experiments / research just to check whose interpretation is correct. In some
cases, such extra experiments may be useful, but they will delay your paper being
published.

One way to avoid the referee making such requests is to predict what these requests
are likely to be. Then you deal with them already in your initial manuscript in a way

that your referees will be willing to digest (Sects. 9.11 , 9.12 , and 17.8 ).
So, let’s imagine that you have made a calculation of one plus one and found that
the result is three, contrary to the normal result of two. You have your own explana-
tion for this strange result. You know that there are two other possible hypotheses
for interpreting your data – H1 and H2 – but in any case you want your own hypoth-
esis, H3, to be seen as the only possible interpretation. The secret is not to ignore H1
and H2, but to deal with them explicitly. You do this by investigating them (either
fully or partially) and by proving that they are not possible explanations. The key is
to do so in such a convincing way, that the referee then does not feel the need to
request you to investigate H1 and H2.

Below is a fictitious example of how to convince the referee to accept your hypoth-

esis (H3) rather than H1 or H2.
We believe that there are three possible ways of interpreting our fi ndings. The fi rst, H1, is
that the result of three, contrary to the normal result of two, can be explained by … However,
if this were the case, then the result should have been four. In fact, H1 is probably due to the
rather low computational power, which the authors [Bing et al 2006] who originally pro-
posed H1 later admitted … Moreover, Bing’s methodology may have suffered from …

The second interpretation, H2, proposes that ….. H2 has found some agreement in the lit-
erature [Chan 2009, Marx 2011], however as highlighted by [Uswe 2011], H2 is the result
of a discrepancy in the X values due to …

We thus believe that it is reasonable to discount H1 and H2, and that H3 provides the most

reliable explanation for this apparently strange result. In addition, our finding is consistent
with …
Further evidence for H3 is that …