Anyone have links on writing a methods paper?

[glasscandie]

This probably sounds ridiculously newbie-ish, so don't mind me if it is lol I'd rather make a fool of myself online than with my supervisor!

Anway, we're running this pilot study, of which I guess I'm the PI, I'm not sure (this is different from the other paper I'm first-authoring) to standardize a certain study design in the rat lab. My supervisor wants me to write a methods paper - I've been doing a ton of research, and I essentially can't find anything that makes a methods paper different from a research paper (in terms of layout, sections included). Would essentially I just write it from a different focus (trying to standardize, including issues, etc etc) than the focus of the results of the study we used to standardize, which are secondary to the purpose of running through the study design in this way?

Hopefully someone understood that lol

:: ducks and hides until I see no one's laughing at me::

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[thewesternsky]

No, it sounds like you've got it. They're similar in format.

The crucial distinction is that with a methods paper, you could replace the "example" (or question, or data) with something completely different and the conclusions would remain the same. With an empirical article, that's completely untrue.

Another distinction is that your method section is going to be extremely detailed (no "we used this technique from Jones et al., 2004"). The results will still contain all your data and analyses, but the focus will be on why the results show that the method works (or is better than the old method), rather than on the answer to some other empirical question.

G'luck!

 

[glasscandie]

No, it sounds like you've got it. They're similar in format.

The crucial distinction is that with a methods paper, you could replace the "example" (or question, or data) with something completely different and the conclusions would remain the same. With an empirical article, that's completely untrue.

Another distinction is that your method section is going to be extremely detailed (no "we used this technique from Jones et al., 2004"). The results will still contain all your data and analyses, but the focus will be on why the results show that the method works (or is better than the old method), rather than on the answer to some other empirical question.

G'luck!

Thanks a lot! That's what I was figuring, but I wanted to double-check. I've been trying to find some sort of guide to the methods paper, but the only thing I could come up with was how to write a methods chapter for dissertation.

 

[Ollie123]

Check out "Psychological Methods" - I believe its an APA journal

Would require some digging, but you might be able to find some examples that are close to the kind of paper you want to write.