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using article "the" before three scientific methods

English Language & Usage Asked on March 28, 2021

I dove into similar questions but didn’t find the exact question.
I am writing my paper and I know that "the" should be used before methods, but how could it be when there are 3 methods consecutively in a sentence? I was wondering if you could let me know which of them is true.

  1. We analyzed aftershocks using the Gardner (1974), the Knopo (1986), and the Grünthal (1998) methods.
  2. We analyzed aftershocks using the Gardner (1974), Knopo (1986), and Grünthal (1998) methods.
  3. We analyzed aftershocks using the Gardner (1974) method, the Knopo (1986) method, and the Grünthal (1998) method.

Could we omit the or method in two of them in order to get rid of repetition?

One Answer

I would suggest saying :

We analyzed aftershocks according to Gardner (1974) according to Knopo (1986) ... etc.

'According to' is academic speak for 'according to the methods of'. Or, at least, it was when I was involved in laboratory methodology.

The 'according to' needs to be repeated, otherwise 'according to Gardner (1974), Knopo (1986) etc' becomes ambiguous, in that Gardner/Knopo could refer to a single method reported by multiple authors.

Multiple authors of a single method, that is to say a single paper written by multiple authors, would usually be reported as 'according to Smith et al (2021)', et al being short for et alia meaning 'and others'.

There are also other ways of stating this information.

Correct answer by Nigel J on March 28, 2021

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