When it comes to the formatting of the statistical results writing up, the tables, graphs or any other figures you include in your work, we recommend following APA (American Psychological Association) guidance. APA may or may not be your referencing system, but when it comes to stats, this is the most common format seen. On our Statistical Tests pages we demonstrate how to run tests and how to report them in APA style format. You'll find similar examples in the back on the APA Referencing Handbook (7th edition).
You can find further information about APA on the Library's APA guide as well as the APA website and Blog.
Tables and Figures also have a specific look to them, again we follow the APA guidelines for this. APA don't dictate what needs to be reported in a table or as a figure, it just informs you of how they should be presented. The best resource we've found for this is the APA Style Blog. The APA Style Blog gives guidance on the set up of Tables and Figures, along with Sample Tables and Sample Figures. It very nicely includes a guide for Accessible Use of Colour in Figures too. These are all listed under the Style and Grammar Guidelines dropdown on the Table and Figures page.
When it comes to referencing other peoples tables and figures from journal articles and other sources, you will need to take guidance from the referencing system your school uses. We recommend using the Library's referencing handbooks.
When it comes to reporting numbers, we have some general guidance with following APA style. The sections below come almost directly from The Library's APA Referencing Handbook.
APA guidelines recommend reporting numbers to two decimal places, including statistics such as correlations, t, F, chi-square and p values. However, in certain circumstances where extra precision is necessary (for example, with small p values) more decimals may be reported.
Use the zero before a decimal point only if the number has the potential to exceed 1. Do not use the leading zero if a value can never exceed 1, for example, for p values or correlations. Examples: The averages were 0.45 and 1.2 respectively. Otters’ weight and singing ability were shown to be strongly correlated (r =.82)
APA guidelines recommend reporting the exact p value (for example, p = .089), unless the p value is less than .001. In this case report p < .001. If reporting the exact p value, state early in the results section the alpha level used as a cut-off point for significance in your test. For example, “an alpha level of .05 was used for all statistical tests”.
When reporting a significant difference between two conditions, indicate the direction of this difference, i.e. which condition was more/less/higher/lower than the other condition(s).
