welcome back if you're not being coming back and this is the first video you're watching Please be aware that it's probably about the fourth video in the series and you might want to back up and see some of the earlier ones um in this video I'll be talking about the materials and methods section of a scientific report such as a laboratory report you might write for a science class in college um it also applies to more serious scientific writing so Master's thesis a doctoral dissertation or even an article for peer-review Journal as I've mentioned in some of the prior talks and I'll keep mentioning in these talks the typical organization of a scientific paper involves a title followed by an abstract which summarizes the entire paper but if it's something very short like a laboratory report probably you do not need the abstract that's followed by an introduction which many people call a literature review because the best roductions are almost entirely a review of the literature followed by just a paragraph or two um that's more specific to the report itself after the introduction comes the materials and Method section that's what I'll be focusing on in this video after the materials and Method section comes the results section you'll often see tables and figures showing up in the results section of laboratory reports and that's followed by yet another section usually called the discussion that presents the meaning of the results and if anywhere within the paper you wrote about other people's research other people's presentations then you would also have a reference list sometimes just called references that give more detailed information to help a reader go finds those documents and they can then go and read those things for themselves so in this video I'll be focusing on the method section sometimes it's called method sometimes it's called Methods sometimes it's called materials and methods depending on the class or the journal um or the thing that you're exact you're writing so what's the goal what's the purpose well the purpose of a method section is to clearly it's a key word clearly describe the method used in the study so this section of a report is all about how the research was done what precisely was done okay so this section needs to include clear descriptions of a number of things depending on what your experiment involved depending on what your research was so did you use any equipment where is there any apparatus any machines a scale you know anything these types of things did you use them well if you use them they need to be described because if you don't describe it then the reader will not know precisely what you used they might then go and do a replication of your study and if they don't know what you use they might use something different and get a different answer and not know why so it's very important to describe any equipment that you used what did you use in your research now if you collected data from people um in the past in science we called them subjects subjects in the research so there were 100 subjects in my research um that wording though has changed over the past few days decades and nowadays most people do not use the word subjects anymore but you will see it if you read a lot of scientific research um today we use the word participants because they are participating in our research by giving us answers to our questioners or you doing whatever it is we've asked them to do in our Laboratory um so they are participants in the research so nowadays we use the term participant and participants um if your research does not involve humans it still probably involves something maybe you were looking at cow's teeth okay I don't know whatever it was you were looking at those things studied need to be described clearly in the method section so that the reader will know precisely what it was that you used did you perform any tests now this word test very general it'll completely depend on the research maybe you're doing some sort of medical or sports related research and you drew blood you had blood blood samples taken from your participants and analyzed for oxygen content or lactose acid content or whatever it might be okay so there was a blood test maybe it was a math test I'm a professor I might give my students a math test and their scores on the test that's also a test so there's all sorts of things that would be tests but did you do any tests if so they need to be described to your reader if you're doing any research that involves chemical um particular if you're in medicine it would involve drugs but I'm guessing most viewers of this video are not yet doing that level of research but if you're in a chemistry class you're probably using chemicals well which chemicals the reader will need to know your method section needs to clearly let your reader know what precisely you used and don't forget the amount the amount is critical there's a big difference between one millgram of something and one kilogram of that same substance the results of the research might be quite different depending on how much of the substance gets used so think about any substances you used any supplies you used and if the amounts would matter how much was used now this basically covers many of the details of things that were needed to do the research but you also need in your method section A very clear description of the procedure what did you do first what did you do few seconds you know what was done if the order matters then you also need to specify what the order is so you can actually think about the method section of a laboratory report it's sort of like a recipe so like there's a recipe for baking cookies so you mix the butter and the sugar in one bowl and in a separate Bowl you mix the flour the baking powder and the baking soda and then you put the eggs one at a time into the the butter and sugar mixture mix in one egg and then add the second egg and so on I won't bore you with my chocolate chip cookie recipe um maybe I already have but there's a recipe so there are ingredients and there's procedure you need both in your method section so make sure that your method section provides in paragraph style this is written form paragraphs made up of sentences so topic sentence supporting sentences conclusions so paragraphs that presents the recipe for conducting the research okay so it needs all the ingredients and that again has to be in sentence and paragraph form it should not just be a list for This research the following items were used full colon 1 2 3 4 no no not like that sentences paragraphs imagine you're explaining what you did in your in your research to your roommate okay how would you say it think about paragraphs and sentences so make sure all the ingredients get listed and make sure that a detailed procedure is provided okay and of course that will use the ingredients you just talked about so the goal of the method section is to let the reader know what you did that means they need to know all of the ingredients and how those ingredients were used so what was used and how it was used and this of course needs to be done very clearly why because a careful reading of materials and method section should let some other researcher who has the supplies if they have the same supplies they should be able to replicate the study they should be able to do the exact same research do the exact same experiments so that they can see if they get the same results as you did so you need to list all the ingredients they should not have to guess what you used they should not have to guess about the procedure everything should be very clearly stated in the method section so that another reader could read it and say oh I want to do that research too and they could then go and do it just based on the instructions given in the materials and methods section now in terms of the design of writing it because ultimately you're going to open up a word processor and you're going to start writing this section um what should you do well there's two broad approaches they're actually almost the same um but there's two ways ways that people think of it one is to wrate a unitary section one whole section that is the materials and methods section the other approach is to break down the information and present subsections so you have your materials and methods and then you have a section on the participants and then a section on the materials that were used and then a section on the procedures that were used in either case it's going to be about the same it's really more of a difference of do you want to put in the subheadings or not but think about how complicated is what you're doing how many pages is it if it's only a page long then you probably don't need subsections but you can do it either way you can do it as a unitary section or as is shown here you could have methods as the section title and then you could have subsections such as materials and procedure and you keep you'll notice that I keep writing paragraph style paragraph Style again this is not a list it's not just a set of pictures though in a method section you might want to include a photograph of your experimental setup you set up the experiment take a photo with your cell phone if you have one or bring a little camera to your experiment take a picture or two it might help your reader see what it was you were doing or you might want to include a diagram so go into some software like PowerPoint or some other thing where you can draw draw simple pictures and lay out a diagram showing what it was you did or what the experimental setup looked like so it could actually have other things than paragraphs but it does not have those things instead of paragraphs the paragraphs are always there so in paragraph style what are the materials what was the procedure um in terms of class reports is there a standard well it'll vary based upon your professor what they like um I think more professors like the subsection approach so if I was doing a report in a class I would probably create subsections but many um scientific journals prefer not to bother unless it's very long unless it's many pages long so I'll leave that up to you um as to what you want to do but you might want to check with your professors to see if they have a particular style that they prefer in terms of how to write your reports um last I want to close up with just a few little linguistic notes okay um so the method section what tense should you use well strictly speaking but um um I may change just a little bit in a moment strictly speaking there's actually lots of options there's lots of options but people tend to expect or like a particular way better um generally a method section should probably be written in the past tenses so the goal is to explain what did you do okay what was done um the the other option which I do not recommend but you might see it if you read a lot of scientific work is to use the presents and future tenses and instead of saying what was done you explain to the reader how they would replicate your research so basically you are saying what was done but you're using present and future tenses as if giving instructions to them to your reader telling them how to go about performing a replication study of the research in the case of scientists who are trying to publish in scientific journals there's actually usually a document called instructions to authors that tells us how they want it done um but for a class report um and if you're not quite sure what you should use I would say go with the past tenses it's always the safest and usually it's preferred so describe what you did what did you do describe that in your materials and methods section a few other little notes um this next one is a little bit weird because it has to do with scientific writing not scientific speaking and not formal English so let me jump into this um in scientific writing and particularly modern scientific writing we are supposed to avoid or completely avoid using the words I we and similar words like you or our or my these types of words we're not supposed to use them 50 years ago in scientific writing nobody really cared so much if you use them um but today in Modern English scientific writing it's considered poor style to use I and we and you within written documents now you might notice if you're paying very close attention to these videos and my wording I sometimes am using these words but that's spoken formal academic English it's fine in non-scientific formal English using these words is usually fine but in scientific English in writing you're not supposed to use these words so what do you do well what you do is you use passive voice in almost every case you can convert a sentence that started with I or we into a passive voice version for example let's say you want to write I heated the mixture to 40° C well you're not supposed to use I but change it to passive voice it's very easy the mixture was heated to 40° C so again this is written scientific English in normal written English outside of science you wouldn't need to worry about this um but for scientific English go for the passive voice okay so if you're if you did your research with some other people and you wanted to write we measured the temperature every 30 seconds instead write the temperature was measured every 30 seconds it conveys the same information but does so without using I we and similar words it does not come up often but occasionally you'll find yourself in a situation where passive voice doesn't work or it just sounds very very awkward in those cases instead of using I or we then use something like the present author so the present author undertook This research in order to boom boom boom okay um or the present investigator um if there's more than one of you then the presence researchers or the presence authors concluded that boom boom boom but usually passive voice will work fine so where possible use passive voice rather than one of these alternates to the words I and we I know it's a strange one but that's modern scientific English writing um so those are few thoughts on writing method sections and scientific writing in general in future videos we'll be looking at the results section and the discussion section and a few other things so remember for the method section paragraph Style make sure it has all of the ingredients make sure the procedure is clearly presented and make certain that the reader will understand it so if it would help to give a photograph of the experimental setup or a diagram of the experimental setup include that as well not instead of the paragraphs but in addition to to help your reader write it so that a reader reads your method section and they understand I know exactly how this was done in fact fact if I have the ingredients I could go do the research right now thank you for watching