No. This is not acceptable. The methods section is the single most important part of a scientific paper. If those details are relegated to supplementary materials, then it's not a scientific paper in a scientific journal.

It similarly bugs me when papers, particularly by biologists, exile ALL the math & statistics to the supplement. That's the ONLY part I want to read, usually. Some of them really, really hate equations.It similarly bugs me when papers, particularly by biologists, exile ALL the math & statistics to the supplement. That's the ONLY part I want to read, usually. Some of them really, really hate equations.

Just be glad it's not "available upon reasonable request"

Reputable journal?

Are the journal article Version of Record (VoR) AND the online-only supplement both Open Access (OA)? If not, this is doubling down on hindering scientific communication/debate/reproducibility. (And I mean the Budapest Declaration definition of OA, not the ongoing reframing by multiple journals.)

How can this pass the review!? (If submitted like this). If methods section was removed from the manuscript itself at request of reviewers/editor, I would have withdrawn the Submission to this journal

The counterpoint is that many methods sections written to a word limit are functionally useless. I would strongly prefer a comprehensive supplemental methods section to a useless one. I live in the future, I have a reference manager, I can keep track of two PDFs.

A scientific article should provide an accurate account of what you did & what you found. It should be unglamorous & slightly dull for detail. If you separately want to 'tell a story', write a blog or press release. The conflation of science with storytelling is problematic.

Scientific articles should provide an accurate account of what you did & what you found. It should be unglamorous & slightly dull for detail. If you separately want to 'tell a story', write a blog or press release. The conflation of science with storytelling is problematic.

I'd agree somewhat with it if it was doi linking to a detailed protocol in somewhere open like protocols.io (leaving the journal the 'story', but opening up the science) - but there still ought to be some general methodology in there.

Devil's advocate: most methods sections could be relegated to the supplementary material without loss because they only say *what* was done and not *why*, and the *what* is mostly just opaque fraff chat. Good morning!