Effective literature search is important for several reasons. Before you conduct your study, you need to identify other previous studies that addressed research questions or hypotheses that are comparable to yours. Interpreting research results can help in designing appropriate methodological approaches for your study.
However, after your study is completed—when you are interpreting your research results or drafting your research paper—you need to compare the findings in your research with those of previous studies in your research field. The “discussion” section of your manuscript is where you will need to present the interpretations of your results and the conclusions you draw.
This section is critical because peer reviewers will use it to evaluate how relevant your research results are in the current context. In this section, you should summarize the key findings in your research—whether they support or contradict your research hypothesis.
If your literature search and review are robust, you will be able to confidently write about how well your approaches to analyzing the research results were, how useful/reliable your research methodology was, and how well your research filled existing knowledge gaps.
Even when your research results are different from those of previous studies, interpreting research results from previous studies will allow you to explain why this may be so and thus showcase your in-depth understanding of the research topic. A thorough comparison of your research results with existing literature may also give you new insights into the research topic, potentially giving direction to any future studies on that topic.
While comparing data with previous studies in research, organize the interpretations of the results around your research question and ask these questions:
- Are your research results consistent with previously published results on this topic?
- If yes, do your research results confirm or further support your existing knowledge/conclusions from previous studies in research?
- If not, do the research methodologies used in these studies differ from what you used in yours? Could the differences be attributed to differences in factors such as the sample size, animal models, patient characteristics, geographic location of the study, time or length of study, experimental conditions, and outcome measures?
- Irrespective of whether your research results are consistent or inconsistent with those of previous studies in your research field, are your interpretations aligned with those presented by the authors of these studies?
- How relevant or significant are your research results in the context of existing literature?
Comparing your research results with previously published ones can be tedious as one would need to find all research papers from different databases and then spend time interpreting research results to ascertain their relevance. What can make this challenging task easy is using smart apps, such as R Discovery, a free to download app for researchers developed by Researcher.Life.
R Discovery is powered by AI and designed specially to help researchers and students find previous studies in research and existing literature in their field of study with ease. It helps find the latest and most relevant research papers from a comprehensive database of published academic literature from all disciplines. It also provides you a clear summary of open access papers that helps in easily interpreting research results before you decide whether to ready the entire paper, making R Discovery a perfect tool for your literature search. Moreover, users of R Discovery can create their own personalized library of previous studies in research topics of your interest.
Going beyond literature search to comparing your research results with existing studies, the free app can also help you stay updated on trending research. R Discovery is designed to understand a user’s interests based on the preferences they indicate and their search activity on the app. Based on this, it delivers to you top 3 articles in your field of interest.
We hope that the tips and advice provided in this article enable you to compare your research results with previous studies in research in a more thorough, yet simpler and stress-free way.
R Discovery is a literature search and research reading platform that accelerates your research discovery journey by keeping you updated on the latest, most relevant scholarly content. With 250M+ research articles sourced from trusted aggregators like CrossRef, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, Open Alex and top publishing houses like Springer Nature, JAMA, IOP, Taylor & Francis, NEJM, BMJ, Karger, SAGE, Emerald Publishing and more, R Discovery puts a world of research at your fingertips.
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