Quantitatively expressed ideas in lymphoma: text versus numerical displays.

Quantitatively expressed ideas are linkages of two or more characteristics presented by the author in tables or graphs. Such ideas also may be expressed as sentences in the text of the Results section. This study investigated the relative importance of quantitative ideas expressed in the two formats in the same article. A random sample of fifty articles from the lymphoma literature containing numerical relationship displays was selected and each article was carefully read in order to identify and extract the quantitative ideas expressed in the text. Only those ideas not presented in numerical displays were extracted. The final database consisted of records describing numerical relationships displayed in tables and/or graphs and records describing numerical relationships expressed only in the text of the Results section. In this way, the study could determine the added advantages of reading the Results sections, over and above the information provided by the displays of numerical relationships. The text ideas were more difficult to find and extract and were found to be less important when compared with ideas from numerical displays. This study further substantiated the method of extracting quantitatively expressed ideas from numerical displays for rapid technical processing of scientific documents.