Using present tense in scientific papers

学術論文では、「結果」を表す文章は原則として過去形で書くことになっていますが、その論文中の図や表、その他の内容について述べる時は、現在形で表現しなければなりません。

× ：  Figure 1 showed the ROC curve for the model.
○ ：  Figure 1 shows the ROC curve for the model.

× ：  The number of animals in each group was shown in the table below.
○ ：  The number of animals in each group is shown in the table below.

○ ：  The species examined are listed in Table 1.
○ ：  The method is described in Section 2.1.
○ ：  Table 1 lists the species examined in this study.

しかし、次の例のように、過去形と現在形が同じ文章内で使用される場合もあります。

Statistical differences between patients and controls were tested using the Fischer’s exact test, the results of which are shown in Table 3.

Table 3 shows that more than 90% of the subjects had no disability.