Methods

The 'methods' section of a research article corresponds loosely to what is sometimes called 'materials and procedures' in a lab report. A well-written methods section is clearly important to scientific research articles: first, scientific researchers must justify their chosen methodology in order to be able to make claims that are acceptable to the wider scientific community; second, a detailed description of the procedures used in a particular scientific experiment allows other scientists to replicate that experiment, re-testing the claims made.

[|Ngozi (1997)] identifies 3 discourse functions in methods sections of medical research papers, as follows:
 * 1) Describing data collection procedure;
 * 2) Describing experimental procedure;
 * 3) Describing data analysis procedure.

As suggested above, as well as this function of //describing procedures//, in some disciplines it will be necessary to //justify these procedures// as well (see, e.g. [|Lim, 2006], who examined research article methods sections in the 'soft science' field of management studies).


 * Examples**


 * 1) Describing data collection procedure
 * 2) Describing experimental procedure
 * 3) Describing data analysis procedure