23:32 Jun 14, 2010 

"The findings of this study indicated that" ---is a simple, articulate, and extremely useful convention that authors use ALL the time. Passive voice occurs frequently in medical literature; it's simply a more authoritative and clearer way to state things (although this may not be so all the time).

In my case, I tend to use "We found...We showed...our results/findings showed/indicated", like most researchers/medical writers.

22:51 May 27, 2010 

One of my phd advisers told me to use "[possessive adjective] finding or result suggest (indicates) that [implication of the research]." This structure is brief, makes it very clear who is responsible for the research and does not involve an passive sentence (e.g. it is suggested that), which is somewhat awkward. However, my adviser made this comment as a criticism towards many researchers who do not follow his suggestion and use the structures such as "The results of this study suggests" and "It is suggested." I personally follow my adviser's suggestion, but my take is that there is no standard translation and different researchers use different structures.

22:06 May 27, 2010 

Please note that I am NOT asking for the translation of the word 示唆される. Of course I know that the correct translation can be "suggested, "indicated," etc. (I even wrote that in my question). What I'm wondering is how to write the sentence structure. "It is indicated that..." or "It is suggested that..." sounds like a bad machine translation. But there is no indication of what suggests the possibility. All I can come up with is "The results of this study suggest that." This "...示唆される" structure is very common in scientific literature, so there must be a standard translation. I have been translating it for years but have always been dissatisfied with my translations.