Dear Scientists,

I’m a scientist myself.  I’ve written papers, I’ve published papers, I know it’s often long and boring work that isn’t as exciting as seeing good data and telling your friends about it.  I’ve sat in a room with 3 other people just to edit a single paragraph, and god it was dull.  So I can understand if writing your actual paper isn’t the rip-roaring adventure that gets you up in the morning.  

At the same time, science is only as good as the literature. One of our fundamental scientific tenants is the principle of uniformity, that is that anyone should be able to do the same experiment and get the same answer.  If you and I get different answers when we do the experiment then something is definitely wrong, and failed replications have taught us a lot about how much bad science there is out there.  On the other hand, any failed replication will fall back on the excuse that the replicator “didn’t do the experiment right.”  They will claim that something done by the replicator was not done exactly as they had done it, and that this is the source of the error.  I would fire back that it is your job as a scientific writer to give all the details necessary for a successful replication.  If there is something very minor that has to be done in a specific way in order to replicate your experiments, then you need to state that clearly in the methods section of your paper.  Anything not stated in your methods is assumed unimportant to the outcome by definition, so if it is important put it in the methods.

Even worse than the above is the scientific papers which publish no methods to begin with!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been looking for the methods of a paper only to find a note saying “methods performed as previously described,” which links to another paper saying “methods performed as previously described” which links to another paper on and on again until I’m trying to find some paper from 1980 just to know what someone in 2021 did.  I don’t think “as previously described” is sufficient, if the methods are identical then you can just copy and past them in as supplemental material.  It’s the 21st century, memory and bandwidth are very very cheap, there is no need for a restrictive word count regarding your methods.

But the worst of the worst, and the reason I wrote this article, is that I found a paper claiming “methods performed as previously described” which did not link or cite any paper whatsoever.  I have no way of knowing which previously described method this paper is referring to, and in fact no way of knowing whether they are making this all up!  I would go so far as to say this is scientific malpractice, the methods are totally undescribed and thus the experiment is unfalsifiable, because anything I did in an attempt to replicate it might be wrong because I don’t know how it was done in the first place!

So please scientists, publish your damn methods.  Here’s an idea that I’m hoping will catch on, if you don’t have room in the body of your paper and are publishing your methods as a supplement, just copy/paste from whatever document you used to do the experiment.  Most methods are written in the past tense in a paper, but the present tense during an experiment, and furthermore the experimental methods often include extraneous information such as “make sure not to do the next step until X occurs,” this information often being omitted in the published paper.  I would say that this information is not in fact extraneous but should be included, if there is some precise ordering of steps that needs to happen, then that information should be shared with the world.  So whatever protocol you used to do the experiment, with marginal notes and handy tips, just throw the entire protocol into your supplemental information as a “methods” section and stop playing hide the pickle with your experiment by citing ever older papers