Materials and Methods

The methods section provides the reader of your manuscript a detailed account of how you completed your study. It should contain enough information that the reader could complete your study with no other resources. However, it should not contain extraneous details or irrelevant minutia. More information about what constitutes appropriate detail is provided in Mack (2018). [1]

There are really two interrelated goals at work: the reader should be given the ability to reproduce the results and the ability to judge the results. [1]

Style tips:

• Write in past tense.
• Use active voice (first-person is OK, too).
• All tables must have a title above the table and be numbered sequentially.
• All figures (images or graphs) must have a caption (that includes a title and brief description of the figure) below the figure and be numbered sequentially.
• All tables and figures should be referred to in order. If you do not discuss a table or figure it’s not worth including!
• Use tables to convey specific, exact data. Use figures to convey trends and large amounts of data where the exact values do not need to be known exactly by the reader.

Example table formatting:

Table 1: A table with a lot of useful information

Example figure formatting:

.

Figure 1: A block diagram of the HPLC used for this study. (1) Solvent reservoirs, (2) Solvent degasser, (3) Gradient valve, (4) Mixing vessel for delivery of the mobile phase, (5) High-pressure pump, (6) Switching valve in “inject position”, (6’) Switching valve in “load position”, (7) Sample injection loop, (8) Pre-column (guard column), (9) Analytical column, (10) UV Detector, (11) Data acquisition, (12) Waste or fraction collector. By WYassineMrabetTal CC BY-SA 3.0

Further Reading

[1] Mack, Chris A., How to Write a Scientific Paper. SPIE, 2018. doi: 10.1117/3.2317707

---