As a research scientist, I constantly struggled with not being able to thoroughly describe my protocols in depth in the Materials & Methods section because of word limits. Now as an editor for an established title, I work in reviewing and publishing protocols of methods that were published in original research articles but not in as much detail as the authors would have liked. If you have published in a good journal and would like to publish your in-depth methodology, please get in touch with me. As a young researcher, this is an excellent opportunity to add to your repertoire, citation record and document the rigor of your work.
I don’t want to spoil the party Aditi, sorry, but since quite a long time Peter Medawar (Medawar, 1964) showed that scientific articles are TV versions, edited accounts of what actually happened within lab walls. From that point onwards, social constructionism deepened our understanding scientific paper’s rhetorical function in the making of sociotechnical networks ((Edge, 1980);(Bastide, 1979; Latour & Fabbri, 1977; Latour & Woolgar, 1979))Thus, at the end your only concern should be to present a convincing & convenient account of your protocols, since, as Harry Collins (2010) has shown, there is a surmounting amount of details that can not ever been presented. Have you ever try cooking from a recipe?
Bastide, Francoise. (1979). Le foie lavé, approche sémiotique d'une texte de sciences expérimentales. Bulletin du groupe de Recherches SÇmiolinguistiques, 1(7), 9-34.
Edge, David. (1980). Why I Am Not a Co-Citationist Essays of an Information Scientist (1977-1978) (Vol. 3, pp. 240-246). Philadelphia: ISI Press. (Reprinted from: IN FILE).
Latour, Bruno, & Fabbri, Paolo. (1977). La rhétorique de la science: pouvoir et devoir dans un article de la science exacte. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 13, 81-95.
Latour, Bruno, & Woolgar, Stephen William. (1979). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Medawar, Peter. (1964). Is Scientific Paper Fraudulent? Experiment: A Series of Scientific Case Histories. London: BBC. (Reprinted from: NOT IN FILE).
Collins, Harry (2010) Tacit and explicit knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press 186pp.
Regardless, a journal article should include enough information about the methodology so that another researcher can replicate the study.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Publishing