Materials and Methods
June 18th, 2007 by SplineGuy
I’m shifting gears in moving from writing Mathematics papers to writing Bioinformatics papers. In my native tongue, namely mathematics, we tend to write in the first person plural. I don’t know the history or reasoning behind this practice, but when you read a mathematics paper in a journal, they are replete with “we”, “us”, and “our”. From the little that I have read, scientific journals tend to be third person, just stating the facts concisely, much like a newspaper article.
However, there is one place where I was originally a bit uncomfortable with the writing style. In having read a few “Materials and Methods” sections they tend to be almost 100% written in passive tense. For example, in a paper I was reading just today (Modifications of cellulose synthase confer resistance to isoxaben and thiazolidinone herbicides in Arabidopsis Ixr1 mutants), I read the following section:
Mutant ixr1 plants were transformed by A. tumefaciens (GV3101) carrying the various cosmid clones according to Bent and Clough (13), and T1 transformants were selected on MS plates containing kanamycin (50 µg ml-1). To score for isoxaben resistance, surface-sterilized seeds of the transgenic T1 plants were germinated on 0.8% agar-solidified medium containing Murashige and Skoog mineral salts (Sigma) and 600 nM isoxaben. The plates were incubated vertically at 25°C under continuous fluorescent illumination (approx 50 µmols photons m-2·s-1) so that the roots grew on the surface of the agar. Isoxaben resistance was scored after 7 days of incubation.
It continues on for several paragraphs with every last sentence in this tense. Not that I necessarily have a better way to write it, I just recall being reprimanded for overusing the passive tense when I was learning to write my research papers in high school and early undergraduate english courses.
On that note, I’ve begun putting together my first paper in the field. We’ll just have to see how that goes.
It is very interesting the cultural differences among academic
disciplines. The “we, us and our” are deemed to be too informal and
something of an indicator of subjective and perhaps possessive thinking
in the world of science. The materials and methods section is always
written in the past tense as it is merely a record of what was done and
what materials were used. There is really no room for “color”
there–that makes an excellent introduction section all the more
important!
Another wrinkle you may have observed is in the most formal/rigorous (or
maybe just stuffy) papers the severe separation between results and
discussion sections. In some circles it is VERY important to keep the
factual observations and results separate from the conclusions based on
them and the discussions thereof. (Again–an attempt at increased
objectivity) You may want to pay careful attention as to whether your
boss tends to write in that format!
This is fun stuff. I’m glad to hear it is going well for you.
Good luck!
Hey Scott, as Joel said above, the “Materials and Methods” section is generally so mundane [ exception: paper describing a novel method like http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/270/5235/467 ] that big ones like Nature and Science don’t even include it in the paper and give it as supplement [ e.g., http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5820/1817 ] .