What is IMRaD?

Why the four parts exist

Each part answers the question a reader asks in the order they ask it. Before trusting a result, a reader wants to know what problem it addresses, then how the evidence was gathered, then what the evidence showed, then how far to believe it. The ICMJE recommendations describe IMRaD as not an arbitrary publication format but a reflection of the process of scientific discovery. Separating methods from results matters in particular: it lets a reader judge the design before seeing the numbers, and it stops interpretation creeping into the description of what was done.

How it became the standard

IMRaD is younger than many people assume. A fifty year survey of the British Medical Journal, JAMA, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association, found the structure first appeared in the 1940s, passed ten percent of papers in the 1950s, reached about eighty percent in the 1970s and was the only pattern for original papers in the 1980s. Reporting guidelines built on it later. The EQUATOR Network describes a reporting guideline as a checklist, flow diagram or text that says what information a report must include, and most of those checklists are organised under the IMRaD headings.

Turning an IMRaD paper into a poster

The parts survive; their proportions change. The introduction shrinks to a few sentences and one or two references. Methods become labelled entries, such as design, participants, intervention, outcome and analysis, instead of paragraphs, because a reader scans them. Results take the most space, but mostly as figures and headline numbers rather than text. The discussion keeps only the main interpretation, the limitation that matters most and the next step. A board of about a thousand words keeps IMRaD recognisable while giving the results room to be seen from a metre away. A quick way to test the balance is to cover every figure and count the words left in each block: if methods or introduction outweigh results, the board is still shaped like the paper rather than like a poster.

When a poster should depart from it

IMRaD suits empirical studies with a question, a method and a measurable result. It fits less well for a case report, which tells a clinical story in time order; a systematic review, which reports a search and a synthesis; a design or engineering project, where the build process is the contribution; and humanities work, which may argue rather than measure. Billboard style boards also reorder it deliberately, putting the finding first in large type and the IMRaD detail in smaller columns beside it. Departing is fine when the audience will follow the new order; it is not a way to hide thin methods.

Common mistakes

Reporting results in the methods, such as how many people enrolled, is common and confusing; enrolment belongs in results or a flow diagram. Interpreting in the results, with words like suggesting or importantly, blurs the line that makes IMRaD useful. A discussion that simply repeats the results adds nothing. On posters, the most frequent failure is a methods block copied from the paper at full length, which crowds the results into a corner where nobody reads them. Another is dropping the limitations entirely to save space; one honest sentence about the main limit costs little and answers the question a reviewer standing at the board is most likely to ask.

Where it shows up in the poster builder

The forty poster layouts are built around the same sequence. Every board has a title, an author block, at least one section and at least one numbered figure. Methods are handled by a protocol block of labelled entries on 38 boards, and the other two run the procedure as a five stage process chain. Key number blocks appear on 27 boards and a numbered reference list on 34. The undergraduate example follows the standard order closely, from abstract and background through methods, two figures and results to discussion and conclusion points.

Questions people ask