Methodology - 2.1 Structure

When we come to ask our three questions:

1. How do I start the Methodology section? What type of sentence should I begin with?
2. What type of information should be in this section, and in what order?
3. How do I end this section?

As we all know, the methodology should contain a detailed description of what you did and/or used, and this helps to answer the second of the three questions.

Read the example below. Note that just try to get a general understanding at this stage and familiarize yourself with the type of language used if you have difficulty understanding individual words.

Title: Changes in chemistry of groundwater in the chalk of the London Basin

The current investigation involved sampling and analyzing six sites to measure changes in groundwater chemistry. The sites were selected from the London Basin area, which is located in the south-east of English and has been frequently used to interpret groundwater evolution.

A total of 18 samples was collected and then analysed for the isotopes mentioned earlier. Samples 1-9 were collected in thoroughly-rinsed 25 ml brown glass bottle which were filled to the top and then sealed tightly to prevent contamination. The filled bottles were shipped directly to two separate laboratories at Reading University, where they were analysed using standard methods suitably miniaturized to handle small quantities of water.

Samples 10-18 were prepared in our laboratory using a revised version of the precipitation method established by the ISF Institute in Germany. This method obtains a precipitate can be washed and stored easily. The Samples were subsequently shipped to ISF for analysis by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). All tubing used was stainless steel, and although two samples were at risk of CFC contamination as a result of brief contact with plastic, variation among samples was negligible.

As we can see, the first sentence of this methodology should be illustrated a centralized sentence what you did; to be effective and conform to what is normally done in your research paper, the content of the paragraph must explain more detailed information for the words in the centralized sentence.