Escribir Un Articulo Cientifico

The purpose of the methods section is to describe how you obtained your results. Thus, you need to give precise details of the study design, the methods that you used, and how you analysed the data. You should also give some information of where the study was conducted. When writing an epidemiological paper or a paper concerned with environmental issues, you may need to give some informationabout the locations of the centres where the data were collected. Be fairly circumspect in this. Remember that you are not writing a travel guide. Every measurement reported in the results section must have a description of the method used to obtain it. This does not give you licence to fill many pages with all of the minute details of your study. The methods section should only be as long as isneeded to describe the essential details. In reading this section, other researchers should be able to appraise your work critically or repeat your study exactly the way that you did it. The headings that are used in methods sections, such as participants, study design, specific methods, data analysis, etc. classically dictate their own content.

Ethical approval

Ethicists must exercisegate-keeping function. a constructive and objective J Benson 5

It is important to give the details of the institutional ethics review boards who approved your study. Readers will want to be assured that the welfare and rights of the participants in your study were placed above those of the investigators. Ethics committees are convened to protect the rights and welfare of research participants, todetermine whether the risks to participants are warranted by the potential outcomes, and to ensure that informed consent is obtained. Because ethical approval is fundamental to good research practice, many journals now decline to publish results from studies that do not include details of prior ethical approval. In a recent review of published articles, 40% of studies did not report ethical approvaleven though all five of the journals surveyed ask authors to document this. 6 As a result, recommendations were made to prevent unethical research being published in the future. The authors recommended that

every research study should include a statement regarding human subjects and should not refer to other publications for information regarding ethical approval. If the investigators believedthat their study did not need to be reviewed by an ethics committee, the reason for this exemption, which should not have been made by the authors themselves, should be provided. Investigators should always document both the approval from the ethics committee and whether informed consent was obtained from each participant. Because the protection of participants is one of the highest priorities inclinical research, every paper must contain a statement about the protection of the participants.

Study design

Dream research is a wonderful field. All you do is sleep for a living. Ann Fadiman (www.bartelby.com)

The study design should have been clearly identified before the study even began and should be easily described in the methods section. Table 3.1 shows the types of study designthat are commonly used in health research. 7 It is important to state the design of your study up front because each study type has its own strengths and limitations in terms of controlling for bias or confounding. Each study design also dictates the type of statistical tests that are appropriate for analysing the data and describing the results. It may also be important to state whether your studywas observational or experimental.

Participants

Research is a formalised curiosity. It is poking and prying with a reason.

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Readers will want to know how you recruited people into your study. In this, the sampling frame should be clearly described and the inclusion and exclusion criteria should be spelt out in detail. In describing the participants in your...