Introduction to the Methods

The method section is a crucial part of your research article as it informs the reader about your research process, explaining in detail what did you do, why and how. As such, the Methods section does not only describe the process, but also demonstrates credibility of your research. This chapter gives an overview of the main functions of the Methods section.

What does the method section do?

The Methods section is a crucial part of the macrostructure of the research article. One the main functions of the methods section is to describe your procedure – what did you do, on what purpose, with what data, in what order, with what instrument, and how did it help to answer your question(s). It is vital that these descriptions are as comprehensive as possible. The description of your research process needs to be given in such detail that it allows for replication of the study.

However, replicability is not the only goal of the Methods section. Methods also function as a connector between the theoretical and empirical aspects of your research. That is, the Methods section shows the reader how the theory connects to the data and how the results help to answer the questions posed. Standing between the Introduction and Results, the main function of the Methods section is to make these connections explicit in the text.
Another important function of the Methods is to signal the credibility of your research (Smagorinsky, 2008). The Methods section allows you to demonstrate that your research has been carried out rigorously, objectively and ethically. Thus, it allows the readers to see for themselves that the results obtained using the given procedure are credible and that they allow you to answer the research questions and/or solve the problem posed.
In that sense, the Methods section can be thought of as a food recipe. To evaluate the quality of a particular food, it is not enough to know what sort of food the chef intended to make, or what ingredients they put in, but you also need to know exactly how the ingredients were processed, and in what order. Only then, it is possible to evaluate the quality of the outcome.

Do I need a Method Section?

It should be noted that not all disciplines follow the canonical IMRaD structure. In some disciplines, research articles follow a model where there is no distinct section for describing methods. However, this does mean that in those disciplines, the methods should not be described. On the contrary, often enough, studies in the fields where methods are given less attention could benefit from a more explicit description of Methods. Such a description may be presented either as a separate section or as a part of a larger section. The important thing is that the description of methods is explicit enough for the reader to understand how data becomes results (Smagorinsky, 2008)

Writing a Method Section

Similar to the Introduction section, there are also functions typically carried out in the Methods section. These functions have been captured by the DRaC model – Demonstrating Rigor and Credibility, developed by Cotos, Huffman & Link (Cotos et al., 2017). The DRaC model is based on research on methods sections of 900 research articles from 30 disciplines. The DRaC model includes 3 moves and 16 steps. You can find an overview of these in the pdf document included below.