How to Write the Materials and Methods Section of an Agriculture Paper

The test for a materials and methods section is simple: could a competent researcher in your field repeat the study from what you wrote, and get a comparable answer? If any step would need an email to you, that step is missing. This is the section reviewers at an agriculture and nutrition journal read first, and the one that decides whether the results can be believed at all.

Why Reviewers Start Here

A nutrition journal reviewer cannot assess results without knowing how they were produced. A yield difference means nothing until a reader knows the plot size, the replication and the season; a nutrient value means nothing until they know the analytical method.

This is also where most major-revision requests originate. Papers are rarely rejected because the finding is uninteresting. They are sent back because nobody can tell what was done.

What Belongs in a Field Study

Site — location with coordinates or district, altitude, soil type, texture, pH and organic carbon
Season and year — kharif 2024, rabi 2024–25; and the rainfall and temperature over the growing period
Design — randomised block, split plot, factorial; number of replications; plot size in metres
Treatments — every level, with rate and units (120 kg N ha⁻¹, not “recommended dose”)
Variety — name and source, with the binomial and its authority at first mention
Package of practices — sowing date, spacing, irrigation, plant protection; state what was uniform across treatments
Observations — what was measured, on how many plants, at what stage
Statistics — the model fitted, the software, and the post-hoc test with its significance level

“Recommended dose” and “standard package of practices” are the two phrases that most often trigger a comment. They mean different things in different states and different years, so write the actual numbers.

What Belongs in a Nutrition or Dietary Study

Population and sampling frame — who was eligible, who was excluded, how they were selected
Sample size — how the number was arrived at; a power calculation if one was done
Period — months and year; season matters for food availability
Dietary assessment method — 24-hour recall, food frequency questionnaire or weighed record, how many days, and who administered it
Food composition source — which tables and which edition or year
Anthropometry — instruments, precision, how many measurements per subject, and the reference standard for z-scores
Biochemical methods — the assay with its reference, and the recovery or quality-control data
Ethics — approving committee and consent procedure

The food composition source is the single most commonly omitted item, and it is not a formality. The same food can differ by a third between tables, so a nutrient intake figure without its source cannot be compared with anything.

The Level of Detail: Two Versions

Not enough:

“Iron content was estimated using standard methods. Data were analysed statistically.”

Enough:

“Iron was determined by atomic absorption spectrophotometry after wet digestion in nitric and perchloric acid (9:4 v/v), following AOAC method 999.11. Recovery from certified reference material was 97.4 per cent. Analyses were run in triplicate and means compared by one-way analysis of variance with Tukey's test at p = 0.05, using the statistical package named below.”

The second is four times the length and removes four reviewer comments before they are written. That is the trade every time.

The Weather Paragraph Everyone Skips

Field results in any agriculture and nutrition journal are conditional on the season, and a paper that omits the weather cannot be interpreted or compared. This is a small paragraph with a large effect on how useful your work is to somebody else.

Give total rainfall over the crop period and how it was distributed, mean maximum and minimum temperature, and any unusual event — a dry spell at flowering, unseasonal rain at harvest, hail. Say where the data came from: an on-site weather station, the nearest meteorological station with its distance, or a gridded dataset.

Two sentences here let a reader in another state judge whether your result is likely to hold for them. Without it, a yield response to nitrogen is a number from an unknown year, and a reviewer who works on the same crop will say so.

The equivalent in a dietary study is season and food availability. Intake measured in one month is not habitual intake, particularly where the diet follows the harvest calendar, and stating the month is what allows another author to compare their figures with yours.

Tense, Voice and Order

Past tense throughout, because you are describing what was done. Most agriculture and nutrition journal style guides say so explicitly. Present tense creeps in around software and standing facts and reads oddly next to the rest.

On voice, follow the journal's convention and be consistent. Passive is traditional here (“samples were digested”), but an occasional active sentence is not an error and often reads better.

Order the section as the work happened: site and material, design, treatments, what was measured, how it was analysed. A reader following your sequence can hold the study in their head; one jumping between analysis and design cannot.

Things That Do Not Belong Here

Results. Not even a preview. “Yield was higher in T3” belongs in the next section
Justification of the design. Why you chose a split plot goes in the introduction
Interpretation. Save it for the discussion
Catalogue numbers and buffer recipes for standard reagents, unless the method depends on them
Copied text from another paper. Method sections are the commonest source of similarity-report hits, and reusing your own earlier wording without citation is treated the same way

Ethics, Consent and Permissions

Any agriculture and nutrition journal submission involving human participants needs an ethics statement: which committee approved it, the reference number if there is one, and how consent was obtained. For work with children, say who gave consent and whether the children assented.

Studies involving animals need equivalent approval. Work on farmers' fields needs the landholder's permission, and studies collecting plant material may need a permit depending on where it came from. A nutrition journal will ask for these before publication, so write them in from the start.

A Check Before You Submit

Could someone repeat this without contacting me?
Is every rate, dose and quantity given with units?
Is the design named, with replication and plot or sample size?
Does every analytical method have a reference?
Is the food composition source or reference standard named, with its year?
Is the statistical model stated, along with the software and the post-hoc test?
Is the ethics approval and consent statement present?
Have I removed every result and every interpretation?

Eight questions. An agriculture and nutrition journal reviewer is asking the same ones, and answering them yourself first turns a major revision into a minor one.

One more habit worth building: write the methods section while the work is happening, not months later. Sowing dates, instrument settings, the exact digestion time, the batch of reference material — these are all obvious at the time and gone by the time you sit down to write. A running file kept alongside the experiment turns the hardest section of an agriculture and nutrition journal paper into a tidying job.

Frequently Asked Questions

How detailed should the methods section be for an agriculture and nutrition journal?

Detailed enough for a competent researcher in the field to repeat the study without contacting you. Standard published methods can be cited rather than described in full, but any modification you made must be written out.

Can I cite a method instead of describing it?

Yes, if it is published and accessible — give the reference and note any change you made. Citing a method that appears only in an unpublished thesis or an inaccessible local report is not enough, because the reader cannot reach it.

Do I need to name the statistical software?

Yes, along with the version where it matters. Different packages implement post-hoc tests and mixed models differently, so the software is part of the method rather than a footnote.

Where do I put the ethics approval statement?

In the methods, usually at the end or immediately after the description of participants. Give the approving committee, the reference number if there is one, and how informed consent was obtained.

How do I write about a method I modified?

Cite the original, then state precisely what you changed and why in one or two sentences. “Following Smith et al., with digestion time extended from 45 to 90 minutes to allow for the higher fibre content” is complete and takes a line.

Is it acceptable to reuse my own methods text from an earlier paper?

Only with citation. Method sections legitimately repeat between papers from the same laboratory, but reproducing your own published wording without acknowledging it is treated as a form of plagiarism by any nutrition journal that screens submissions, and screening is routine.

Related Guides

What comes next in the manuscript:

Created by Ishaan Malhotra • 10 Aug 2026