The Materials & Methods Section Crossroads

Hello, the project of Science Audio Articles is drawing its shape. At this point, we think the product is recognisable, which happens after only a few months and we are proud of it. The idea of creating this was flying around, but when you start laying down the thoughts, everything becomes more complicated. We are very committed to the philosophy of continuous growth, so it is an exciting process. In the near future, there will be a lot of things to polish and decisions to take, but in this post we want to talk about one: the Materials & Methods section crossroads. 

We will start with a bit of context, as you know, there exist different kinds of scientific literature, Systematic Reviews, Perspectives Articles, Brief Reports, Clinical Cases, etc, and every one has its particular structure, extension rules and goals. So far, we have been focused on Original Researchers paper -despite we have already published some Review’s audio-, which usually are divided in sections namely Summary, Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results and Conclusions, including tables and pictures. Depending on who you are (a researcher, a curious outsider), what moment your investigation is in (looking for new approaches, wanting to replicate an experiment) or your style of reading scientific literature (seeing the pictures first, going directly to Results), you will face an article in one way or another. Thinking in a general audience, they could be interested in all the sections for different motives, for example, the Summary gives you an overview of the topic treated, the Introduction provides you with more background about the issue to clarify and the Results takes out the main achievements of the study, but to find something useful in the the Materials & Methods section, you have to be really deep inside the topic, even in that case, it usually is a little bit boring of reading or listening, that’s why we normally avoid it in the audios. 

Nevertheless, should we cut this part every time? We think about this with every article, because eventually a crazy experimental section shows up, for example, one about taking pictures of plastics in the ocean from a satellite (6) or another one with a complex statistical cut of participants (12), and we really have to share it. We thought that a it would be a good idea to upload the Materials & Methods section separately to the rest of the audio article, so you can just jump it if you think it would be boring for you; in other cases, relax, we will avoid you to suffer a long section of names of lab equipments, chemical product companies or the size of the beaker used for one reaction. 

If you have further comments or you think of a better way to do it, don’t hesitate and contact us, we want to create the best product possible and we need your help for that.

See you around! 

SAA

PS: We also usually cut Acknowledgements, Key Words, Conflicts of Interest and References sections, because we think they are unnecessary to understand the main points of the article, but it was pretty obvious from our point of view.