Purpose of the Methods section

Traditionally, students are taught that the Methods section provides the information needed for another competent scientist to repeat the work. In your experience of reading papers, is this what you find? Many participants in workshops we have conducted report that they have had problems in replicating what authors have done in their published studies even after reading the Methods section thoroughly.

Another way to think about the goal of the Methods section is that it establishes credibility for the results and should therefore provide enough information about how the work was done for readers to evaluate the results; i.e. to decide for themselves whether the results actually mean what the authors claim they mean. Referees are likely to look in this section for evidence to answer the question: Do the methods and the treatment of results conform to acceptable scientific standards?

A short note on the naming of this section of a research article is in order here. Practice varies, so alternative names for a single section describing methods include Methods, Materials and methods, and Experimental procedures. In papers that follow the AIBC (Abstract, Introduction, Body sections, Conclusions) structure, methods may be described in more than one body section, and none of them may actually be labelled Methods. For the sake of simplicity, however, we use the term Methods throughout this chapter. It is generally accepted that methods that have been published previously can be cited and need not be described in detail, unless changes have been made to the published procedures.

However, if the previous publication is not readily available to your international audience (e.g. the original journal is written in a language other than English), it is recommended that you give the details in your paper, as well as the citation to the original source. Include the language of its publication in brackets in the reference list, if appropriate. Any novel method should be described in full. You should aim to include the information a referee might need to access in order to be confident of the appropriateness and effectiveness of the method used.

Organizing Methods sections

If a goal of the Methods section is to help readers evaluate the findings presented in the Results section, then the author needs to make it clear how the two sections relate to each other. In addition, readers may come to the Methods from anywhere in the article. Two strategies can help with showing the connections:

Strategy 1: Use identical or similar subheadings in the Methods and the Results sections.

Strategy 2: Use introductory phrases or sentences in the Methods that relate to the aims, e.g.

To generate an antibody to GmDmt1;1, a 236-bp DNA fragment coding for 70 N-terminal amino acids was amplified using the PCR,….

An additional strategy to clarify the logic of the Methods section is to use the first sentence of a new paragraph to introduce what you will be talking about and relate it to what has gone before. In the example below, disturbance treatment refers to a concept that has been mentioned previously, and the sentence introduces the reader effectively to the content of the paragraph to follow (Britton-Simmons & Abbott 2008, p. 137, paragraph 2):

The disturbance treatment had two levels: control and disturbed. Control plots were…