Scientific article: How to say that with our result something could be done but hasn't
I am writing something similar to a review article about a scientific insight that connects and streamlines a number of seemingly different previous results.
In the introduction, I give an example of one of those previous results and say something like
In Section X, we discuss how this and other previous results in Topix X follow from our result.
(Not really using 'result' twice, this is just to set the stage.)
I now want to say something like the following, but am not sure how professional and scientific it sounds:
Another example, which seems to not have been discussed in previous literature, would be ...
I am trying to say that using our insight you can not only do previous things but you can also do more and they will easily produce novel results. Note that I only want to formulate the possibly novel problem, the article is not actually going to follow up on it (though I did actually work it out myself to be sure I'm not proposing nonsense)
The focus of the paper is really the explanation of the insight and the derivation of old result starting from this insight.
I am pretty sure that I read smooth formulations saying the same thing in another paper before, but I couldn't find it.
This is my first post on this site, and I apologize if asking for phrases is not what this site is for.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/31279. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I don't have citations, but I've seen a couple approaches to this problem:
"One possible application of (this work) would be to..." -- by casting it speculatively like that, using "would be", you're saying "this is an idea, not something we've demonstrated".
"A possible application of (this work) not found in our review of the literature is..." -- here you're offering the idea and saying you did some legwork and didn't find anybody who pursued it.
Unless you're writing this in the abstract, you probably don't need to say explicitly that you're not following up on the idea in this paper -- readers can see that easily enough. If you are using this in the abstract (or early in a longer work), you can signal that you're not going to talk about it here by using the word "future": "An area for future work would be to apply (this work) to (this new idea)". "Future work" is code for "not addressed in the present work".
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