Kyrgidis A, Triaridis S
Hippokratia. 2010 Dec;14(Suppl 1):13-22.
The purpose of the Materials and Methods section of a scientific manuscript is to provide information in sufficient detail, so that another scientist working in the same field of endeavor is able to repeat the experiments and reproduce the results. Authors are entitled to a justified decision on the publication or not of their work. Thus, reviewers need to assure the authors that they have studied, correctly interpreted and fairly judged their work. This can be done by writing a short introductory paragraph in their critique, mentioning the type of study, the subjects recruited, the time and places the study was conducted, the interventions, the outcome measures and the statistical tests. All these information should be found in the methods section. If the reviewer cannot find these information, he needs not to read the whole article. Reading through the abstract and the methods section, he can reject the article on good grounds. If the methods section is appropriate, then the whole article need to be further reviewed. In this manuscript we shall discuss several critical aspects of the methods and statistics from the reviewer's perspective to provide reviewers the knowledge basis to write the aforementioned introductory paragraph of their critique.
科研手稿中“材料与方法”部分的目的是提供足够详细的信息，以便在同一研究领域工作的其他科学家能够重复实验并再现结果。作者有权对其作品是否发表做出合理决定。因此，审稿人需要向作者保证，他们已经研究、正确解读并公正评判了其作品。这可以通过在评论中写一段简短的介绍性段落来完成，提及研究类型、招募的受试者、研究进行的时间和地点、干预措施、结果测量方法以及统计检验。所有这些信息都应在方法部分找到。如果审稿人找不到这些信息，他无需阅读整篇文章。通过阅读摘要和方法部分，他就可以有充分的理由拒稿。如果方法部分合适，那么整篇文章需要进一步审阅。在本手稿中，我们将从审稿人的角度讨论方法和统计学的几个关键方面，为审稿人提供撰写上述评论介绍性段落的知识基础。
