Methods

 The purpose of the methods section is to describe how you obtained your results. Thus, you need to give precise details of the study design, the methods that you used, and how you analysed the data. You should also give some information of where the study was conducted. When writing an epidemiological paper or a paper concerned with environmental issues, you may need to give some information about the locations of the centres where the data were collected. Be fairly circumspect in this. Remember that you are not writing a travel guide.

Every measurement reported in the results section must have a description of the method used to obtain it. This does not give you licence to fill many pages with all of the minute details of your study. The methods section should only be as long as is needed to describe the essential details. In reading
this section, other researchers should be able to appraise your work critically or repeat your study exactly the way that you did it. The headings that are used in methods sections, such as participants, study design, specific methods, data analysis, etc. classically dictate their own content.