ABSTRACT
A clearly formulated Table can provide an easily assimilable summary of a large amount of data. Tables can be part of your Materials and Methods. For example, in medical papers, a Table can be useful for summarizing the clinical details of the patients in a study and the outcome of treatment. In papers in molecular biology, Tables are useful when many lines of cells, plasmids, and sequences are discussed in the Materials and Methods. Tables are useful as part of your Results when you are discussing the values of several related parameters that do not lend themselves easily to graphical representation. On rare occasions, Tables may even help you to explain your results in the Discussion. You should not, however, put your data in a Table if they can be described simply in a sentence or two. Tables that are not strictly necessary are a waste of space.
