Abstract

To better understand how methods are written in the scientific community, a project was undertaken for my Writing in Biology course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the fall of 2018. A figure was built consisting of two photos of a spider-web on the UMass campus, along with a map of the location of the spider web. A methods section was written for this process, and fellow classmate followed this. A replicated image, solely based on the methods section was created, and then compared to the original figure. It was found that unless a methods section is explicit on important factors such as the number of pictures, labeling, and figure size specifications, it is difficult to replicate a figure or process. Regardless of this, small differences will be present, highlighting the importance of being explicit in every way possible when writing a methods section.