Fifty Years of Crop Science: An Invaluable Resource for Teaching Research Methods.

Crop Science has been published for more than 50 years. Changes for improvement in format and technical content have occurred in the Journal over the years and the Journal has set the standard that has been adopted to teach research methods to undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Crop Production and Protection, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria as well as participants in training courses organized for maize research technicians and scientists at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria. Students and trainees were guided to identify the different components of the sections of a standard scientific paper in the field of Crop Science, including the Title, Abstract, Introduction, Review of Literature, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion (or Results and Discussion), Conclusion and References. Students and course participants discovered that a standard Abstract should contain statements on justification for the research, objective(s), methodology, results and conclusion possibly with recommendation, which is optional, all of which must not exceed the number of words specified by the Guide to Authors of the Journal. Similarly, they found that the Introduction section should contain statements on Background to the Study, Research Problem, Objective(s), Research Questions, Research Hypotheses, Scope and Limitations, and Definition of Abbreviations and Acronyms. Similar analysis of the contents was done for the other sections of the papers published in Crop Science. Papers from several issues in each of the 50 volumes published from 1961 to 2010 were randomly selected and analyzed to determine the level of compliance of the authors with the requirements for good research. Level of compliance was relatively low in the early years but has increased to nearly 100% in the recent issues. Level of compliance was significantly higher for papers published in Crop Science compared with two other international and two local journals. Exposure of the students to published journal articles and their hands-on experience in analyzing the contents of the papers greatly improved the research output of the students, including thesis writing and oral presentation of research results.