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Illinois Junior Science
and Humanities Symposium
Materials & Methods
| Look at the table below. If your Materials & Methods section looks similar to the examples below, you have written in a "cookbook recipe" style, which is not scientific writing style.
Notice that the student excerpt looks very similar to the recipe on the left. It has numbered step-by-step directions or procedures. Compare the above example with Raleigh's Materials & Methods. Raleigh's is written in scientific writing style, a narrative format. She first explains her human subjects protocol (required when dealing with humans). Then she explains her materials and her methods. She explains how she conducted the procedures, why she did what she did, and the controls used in her methods (for contamination as well as researcher bias). Another researcher could replicate her experiment from her written description. |
| Provide enough information so anyone with minimum knowledge and training in the field can reproduce the results. If there is a standard procedure, merely cite the reference. For example, "All samples were stored at -20¡C in the laboratory until DNA analyses were conducted. Extraction of DNA followed the procedures of Maniatis et al. (1989) and Jeffreys et al. (1985) as modified by Robinson (1993)." Or in the "recipe" example above, notice that the procedure is taken verbatim from a laboratory manual. The procedure belongs in YOUR lab manual, but this detail isn't needed in the methods. A citation of the standard laboratory procedure would be sufficient, such as "Water testing of the samples was conducted according to procedures outlined in LaMotte (2004)." What is important for the reviewers to know is where and how you sampled your water, and if you designed your own procedures or used a standard procedure for sampling. Again, this would be written in narrative format, not recipe style.
Another example of a standard procedure would be a nurse drawing blood. A nurse has knowledge and training in the field and would not need step-by-step procedures on how to draw blood. It is a standard procedure. A citation for the procedure is sufficient. Summarize your methods, but don't write step-by-step for common procedures. Don't repeat the same information over and over for each time it is done. That is excessive. |
| Raleigh's description is reproducible, yet she didn't write a recipe for the procedures. Another researcher could repeat her procedures and get similar results. This is key to convincing others that you have discovered something real. |
| Sometimes students fail to explain why they did what they did, which is quite useful to the reader. Don't assume your reader understands what seems clear to you as the researcher. Again, using Raleigh's paper as an example, she tells why she chose to do certain procedures, e.g., "Adolescents were excluded from the study because...," and "Each subject wiped his hands on a dry paper towel. This procedure was instituted to control for. . ." |
