1. How did you answer this question? There should be enough information here to allow another scientist to repeat your experiment. Look at other papers that have been published in your field to get some idea of what is included in this section.

2. If you had a complicated protocol, it may helpful to include a diagram, table or flowchart to explain the methods you used.

3. Do not put results in this section. You may, however, include preliminary results that were used to design the main experiment that you are reporting on. ("In a preliminary study, I observed the owls for one week, and found that 73 % of their locomotor activity occurred during the night, and so I conducted all subsequent experiments between 11 pm and 6 am.")

4. Mention relevant ethical considerations. If you used human subjects, did they consent to participate. If you used animals, what measures did you take to minimize pain?

In the Materials and Methods section you explain clearly how you conducted your study in order to: (1) enable readers to evaluate the work performed and (2) permit others to replicate your study. This section should be the easiest section to write.

You must describe exactly what you did: what and how experiments were run, what, how much, how often, where, when, and why equipment and materials were used. The main consideration is to ensure that enough detail is provided to verify your findings and to enable the replication of the study.

You should maintain a balance between brevity (you cannot describe every technical issue) and completeness (you need to give adequate detail so that readers know what happened).

Since each journal has different requirements, review the journal’s guidelines before beginning to write this section. The steps listed here are a general compilation of these requirements.

1. Order your procedures chronologically or by type of procedure and then chronologically within type of procedure using sub-headings, where appropriate, to clarify what you did. It is up to you to decide what order of presentation will make the most sense to your reader.

2. Use the past tense and the third person to describe what you did. For example: “The sample was incubated at 37oC for 3 days.” - NOT: “I incubate the sample at 37C for 3 days.”

3. Describe your experimental design clearly, including the hypotheses you tested, variables measured, how many replicates you had, controls, treatments, etc.

4. Explain why each procedure was done. Reference may be made to a published paper as an alternative to describing a lengthy procedure.

5. Identify the source of any specific type of equipment, a specific enzyme, organism, or a culture from a particular supplier, which is critical to the success of the experiment.

6. Describe in detail any modifications to equipment or equipment constructed specifically for the study and, if pertinent, provide illustrations of the modifications.

7. Precisely quantify measurements (all metric) and include errors of measurement.

8. Describe the dates and the site where your field study was conducted including physical and biological characteristics of the site, if pertinent to the study’s objectives.

9. Identify treatments using the variable or treatment name, rather than an ambiguous, generic name or number (e.g., use "healthy donors" rather than "group 1").

10. If required by the journal, mention the approval for the study by the relevant ethics committee(s) and the informed consent of the subjects.

11. Describe statistical tests and the comparisons made; ordinary statistical methods should be used without comment; advanced or unusual methods may require a literature citation.

12. Show your Materials and Methods section to a colleague and ask whether they would have difficulty in repeating your study.

\noindent Other points to consider when writing the Materials and Methods:

1. Don't mix results with procedures.

2. Omit all explanatory information and background - save it for the discussion.

3. Don’t include information that is irrelevant to the reader, such as what color ice bucket you used, or which individual logged in the data.