Q. In my trusty book on how to write a paper, it says I need to write a mission statement in my methods section stating the p value etc. How should I word such a statement?

A. The first thing I need to emphasize is that wherever you place your p-values, it should not be in your methods section. Your statistical methods section should contain your chosen level of statistical significance, however, which is typically 0.05 (or, 5%).Your p-values are results and should be introduced in the results section and referred to in the discussion section.

Moreover, by its very name, a mission statement should appear before any methods section. You need to state your objectives (in an introductory section) first and then say how you propose to meet these objectives (in a subsequent methods section). You can also  give the reader a snap-shot version of your report using the abstract at the start. The abstract can contain an aims section which is not so detailed as the later introduction section which you include in the main body of the report. To get a feel for how all of this can be put in place, you may find it helpful to take a look over the following published paper.

Please don’t copy the wording. The wording must be yours. However, you should be able to see from the structure of this paper how you might lay out all of the information you are trying to communicate to the reader and what ingredients are fundamental to communicating your results effectively. Furthermore, you should get an idea of how to order the content of your report into the appropriate sections, which is clearly something which you have not picked up from your reading.

Presenting the Statistical Methods Section in the Final Write-Up by Margaret MacDougall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.