An investigation of the generic structure of the material/methods section of scientific reports

A study was undertaken to investigate the generic structure of Material/Methods sections in Theses and Journal articles, using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Martin’s Genre theory. Literature to date has indicated that the Materials/Methods section is considered the easiest section to write up, with its simple structure of past passive organized around implicit conjunction depending on sequence of events. However, it seems from this study that, although this might be so in scientific reports written for the social sciences, for the physical sciences a much more complicated structure of the Materials/Methods section is required.