The method line

A number on its own tells a reader almost nothing about whether it means what they assume it means. The fix is short: state the method in the same breath as the figure, in a compact and consistent form, every time.

The convention

A method line has four parts, in this order: state, technique, line, repeats.

erect, BP, dorsal, median of 3 is a complete method line. Expanded, it reads: measured erect, bone-pressed to the pubic bone, along the top of the shaft, taking the median of three readings. That is everything a reader needs to know whether your number is comparable to the published data or to their own.

The order does not matter much as long as all four parts are present. What matters is habit - writing it every time a figure appears, not only when you remember or think it is in dispute.

Keep it terse on purpose. A method line that reads like a paragraph gets skipped when a figure is typed quickly, and a convention only works if it is short enough to survive that moment. Four short tokens, comma-separated, does the job without asking for more attention than a number deserves, and it fits inline in a sentence without breaking the reader's stride.

Three examples

Badly stated: "7 inches." No state, no technique, no line, no repeat count. This is not a wrong number so much as an unusable one - it could be almost anything, comparable to nothing.

Partially stated: "6.5 inches, erect." Better - state is present - but bone-pressed or not is missing, and that single omission is the one that moves a figure the most (more on that below). A reader still cannot tell if this number belongs anywhere near the published data.

Well stated: "16.5 cm, erect, BP, dorsal, median of 3." Complete. A reader - including a future version of you - can place this figure against what the published data actually says without guessing at the method behind it.

The omission that causes the most confusion

Of the four parts, leaving out bone-pressed versus non-bone-pressed causes more downstream confusion than any other single gap. The reason is the size of the effect: the fat pad above the pubic bone compresses by an amount that varies a lot between people, so a non-bone-pressed reading can run a full centimetre or more ahead of a bone-pressed one on the same person. State and repeat count matter too, but neither moves a figure by that much on its own. If a method line has to be shortened to one detail, bone-pressed status is the one to keep - see bone-pressed versus non-bone-pressed for what each one actually reports.

Why this is worth the extra six words

The method line costs almost nothing to write and removes the single largest source of disagreement between two numbers that are both, individually, correctly taken. Two people arguing over "6.5 versus 7.2" are very often arguing over BP versus not, not over anatomy - see BPEL and NBPEL for what each abbreviation is actually recording. Attach the method, and the argument mostly evaporates, because there is nothing left to argue about beyond the readings themselves.

Where the convention stops

A method line describes how a length was taken; it says nothing about how to keep a full record across sessions, which is a separate habit worth building - see keeping a measurement log for the fuller set of fields. It also has no equivalent for a subjective judgement. A score from a photo-rating service like Rate Cock does not carry a method line in this sense, because it is not measuring anything in centimetres - it is reporting where an image sits against other images, a different kind of output entirely. The same goes for a person's verdict: what a judge tells you is an opinion with no ruler behind it, and no method line would make it one. And an app that infers a figure from a photo is doing something closer to recognition than measurement in the first place, which is a different process again - none of which needs a method line, because none of it is a method line was built to describe.