en

IMRaD structure

IMRaD: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusions

Introduction    

  • should provide readers with the background information needed to understand the research, its subject, structure, purpose and research problem,
  • should answer the question: what question/problem was studied?,
  • should include a research question,
  • should contain a concise description of a state knowledge in the research area,
  • in case of divergences in the research platforms or directions as well as the results, they should be discussed,
  • current: you should aim to cite references that are not more than 10 years old if possible. Although be sure to cite the first discovery or mention in the literature even if it older than 10 years,
  • relevant: this is the most important requirement. The studies you cite should be strongly related to your research question.

    Materials and Methods    

  • provide the reader with all the details of how you conducted your study,
  • describe what you did in the past tense,
  • describe new methods in enough detail that another researcher can reproduce your experiment,
  • describe established methods briefly, and simply cite a reference where readers can find more detail,
  • state all statistical tests and parameters,
  • restrict the description of the methods used to a necessary minimum, instead focus on the presentation of the way such methods were used in that particular research.

    Results    

  • simply state what you found, but do not interpret the results or discuss their implications,
  • results should be presented in a logical order,
  • present the results in the order of importance,
  • use the past tense to describe your results,
  • to discuss figures and tables use the present tense,
  • do not duplicate data among figures, tables, and text,
  • instead of repeating too much data in the text of the manuscript, focus on the most important ones, 
  • it is much easier to follow data in a table form.