Instructions for creating the basic narrative used to describe your study

TITLE
Descriptive title of the research project; keep it tight, no 100 word titles.

RESEARCH QUESTION
Specify the specific aims for your study.

SIGNIFICANCE
Using the literature, establish any previous work related to your research question. This section should describe the gaping hole in the literature and how your specific aims will attempt to address the gaping hole.

METHODS
The next four sections encompass the methods. Traditionally, this grouping has been headed “Methods” or “Materials and Methods” but studies involving human subjects usually label this section “Patients and Methods”.

DESIGN
What research design was used to address your specific aims? Examples include case series, case-control, retrospective cohort, cross-sectional, prospective cohort and randomized controlled trial.

HEY! Just a reminder that the description “retrospective chart review” is not a study design. You probably really mean a case series or retrospective cohort study.When in doubt, please check with your co-authors or contact the GRMERC Research Department.

SUBJECTS
This is where you’d plop your patient information but, truth be told, not all studies involve patients so adjust your heading accordingly. For example,

you could have done an animal study, worked with cells or even run a meta-analysis. Assuming this is a clinical study, however, you need to provide information to your reader concerning your subjects. You should describe where you obtained your subjects, over what time period and the specific inclusion and exclusion criteria used. If this was a prospective study you will need to state whether informed consent was obtained.

PROCEDURES/VARIABLES/DEFINITIONS
This section basically describes your experimental treatments/interventions (if any), your methods of obtaining your data and a description of your variables. So, if you had a treatment to describe how you removed a patient’s spleen using two magnets and a bungee cord, that would go in here. Likewise, you would provide information about a chart review in this section as well. Provide information about your primary outcome variable, as well as all secondary outcome variables. At times it will be necessary to define these variables, so please be precise.

ANALYSES
Use this section to provide a thorough description of the statistical tests used, your sample size justification (if pertinent to your study) and your criterion for significance (e.g., P < 0.05).

RESULTS
Here’s where you provide the results from your study. Make frequent and liberal use of tables and figures. Make sure that the reader is very aware of what you consider to be the major findings from your study. This is also a place to remark upon some of the minor findings that did not make their way into any of your tables and figures

HEY! Don’t just regurgitate the same information that is already present in your tables and figures. Pick out specific pieces of information on which you would like your reader to focus.  Present comments or observations objectively. Any interpretive analyses should be described in the next section.

DISCUSSION
The discussion section is used to summarize the findings from your study and to interpret your results relative to current findings in the literature.

CONCLUSIONS
The big finish, where you get to blow your audience away with your final, pithy comment. This should be brief, three sentences tops. If you’re at a loss for words, you can either do a combined Discussion/Conclusions section or just do a conclusions section that reiterates the importance of your study.