Scientific Writing Knowledge Hub

IMRaD structure

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What is the IMRaD structure?

IMRaD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This structure forms the main body of a scientific journal article. In addition to the IMRaD sections, most journal articles also include Front Matter (such as the title, abstract, and keywords) and Back Matter (such as references and supplementary information).

Useful resource

You can download a detailed template on how to structure a journal article here.

Why use the IMRaD strucutre?

It is a common structure used in scientific research articles and theses, and helps experienced readers1 to find the information they need quickly.

How to structure an IMRaD paper (or thesis)

1. The Introduction

The Introduction helps your reader decide if the paper is interesting for them and guides the reader from broad context to specific research aims. It can be divided into three components:

  1. Broader context, which argues why this research topic is so important to study (e.g. for saving lives, money, nature, etc.).
  2. Current state of knowledge, which reviews the literature and explains what is currently known, and not known (i.e. the knowledge gap)
  3. Study aims and scope, which tell the reader what they can expect from this research, e.g. what will be studied (aims2) and what will not be studied (scope).

2. The Methods

The Methods explains to the reader how the research questions were answered. It usually has two parts:

  1. Rationale, which justifies the decisions that were made in the study design. In other words, it explains what was measured (or e.g. what model was used), and why.
  2. Main methods, which explains in reproducible detail how each dataset presented in the Results was obtained.

3. The Results

The Results section addresses the research questions using your data, typically presented in figures, tables, and descriptive text. It usually has to parts:

  1. Basic results, such as descriptive statistics or sample characteristics. These basic results typically don’t answer the research questions directly, but validate the more complex results that follow in the main results section.
  2. Main results, which address the research questions by summarising and interpreting the data3, highlighting the most relevant and interesting patterns in the data.

4. The Discussion

The Discussion answers the research questions by comparing the results of the current study with the existing literature. It typically has three components:

  1. Summary, restating the study aims, presenting the main findings (and sometimes conclusions), and describing the contribution of the study.
  2. Main discussion, which presents answers to each of the research questions byinterpreting the results.
  3. Implications, which circles back to the broader context presented in the Introduction and explains how this study contributes to it.

Footnotes

  1. If you’re (relatively) new to reading scientific literature, this format may feel less intuitive. ↩

  2. The study aims are essentially the research questions (but without the question format). ↩

  3. Not to be confused with interpreting the results, which happens in the Discussion. ↩

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