How much detail to include in the Methods?
You need enough detail so that your reader understands how to reproduce your research. That sounds incredibly vague, so allow me to illustrate it.
Say I wanted to explain to you, someone who’s never been in my home, how to find a wine glass in my kitchen.
Too detailed would be:
- Enter the kitchen by pushing open the wooden door.
- Step inside and look around. Identify the cupboards that are hanging on the wall.
- Step forward towards the cupboard all the way on the right.
- Lift your hand.
- Open the cupboard by pulling at the handle.
- You will find wine glasses on the middle shelf.
Too little detail would be:
- It’s in the kitchen.
Enough detail would be:
- If you enter the kitchen, it’s in the cupboard on the far right, on the middle shelf.
However, if you’d visited me before and already knew where the mugs are, this could work too:
- In the cupboard with all the mugs.
So, how much detail do you need? It depends on who you’re writing for, and what context clues they already have.
The same logic applies to your Methods section. Your reader is (usually) another researcher in your field — so the real question isn’t “how much detail is enough” in the abstract, it’s “what does someone with my reader’s background already know, and what do they still need spelled out?” Enough detail means reproducible for them, not reproducible for a stranger with no context at all.
Interdisciplinary research is different
If your research is interdisciplinary, this gets trickier. Your readers won’t share one background — some may be experts in your methods, others may be experts in the phenomenon you’re studying, and some may know neither well. You can’t assume a single shared context the way you can when writing for a narrow field.
This usually means erring on the side of a bit more detail than you’d give a specialist audience — spelling out steps a specialist would find obvious, since not every reader will have that specialist background. Keep the journal you’re publishing in mind too: its readership tells you roughly how wide that gap in background knowledge might be.>