Result

A result (also called upshot) is the final consequence of a sequence of actions or events expressed qualitatively or quantitatively. Possible results include advantage, disadvantage, gain, injury, loss, value and victory. There may be a range of possible outcomes associated with an event depending on the point of view, historical distance or relevance. Reaching no result can mean that actions are inefficient, ineffective, meaningless or flawed.

Some types of result are as follows:

• in general, the outcome of any kind of research, action or phenomenon
• in games (e.g. cricket, lotteries) or wars, the result includes the identity of the victorious party and possibly the effects on the environment
• in mathematics, the final value of a calculation (e.g. arithmetic operation), function or statistical expression, or the final statement of a theorem that has been proven
• in statistics, any information analyzed, extracted or interpolated from polls, tests or logs
• in computer sciences, the return value of a function, state of a system or list of records matching a query (e.g. web search). The result type is the data type of the data returned by a function.
• in science, the outcome of an experiment (e.g. see null hypothesis)
• in forensics and justice, the proof of guilt or innocence of a suspect after evaluating evidence in a criminal investigation
• in economics and accounting, the profit or loss at the end of a fiscal period.
• in democracy, the election of a representative or the outcome of a vote on a subject

In management

In management and related fields, a result is a piece of information that has certain properties in absolute terms or in relation to previous results or settings:

	impact
	positive (+)	neutral (0)	negative (-)
profitability	profit	balance	loss
contest	win	tie	loss
confrontation	victory	armistice	defeat
competition	success	no change	failure
change	increase	stagnation	decrease
causality	direct	random	indirect
reliability	reliable	undetermined	unreliable
credibility	confirmed / verified	unknown	denied / falsified
consistency	consistent	equivalent	inconsistent
sensitivity	public / open	unclassified	classified / secret
accuracy	accurate / false	undefined / null	inaccurate / false
relevance	important	normal	negligible / meaningless

See also

• Determinism