Well said, that man!

Peter Klein writing at the Organisations and Markets blog explains,

Speaking of pet peeves, here’s another of mine: the regular misuse of the word “methodology” in academic papers. Methodology is the study of scientific methods, a branch of epistemology. Econometric techniques, strategies for gathering data, means of testing hypotheses, etc. are methods, not methodologies. Yet how many empirical papers include a section titled “Methodology” or “Data and Methodology”? It makes me cringe. “We use an instrumental-variables methodology,” or “our methodology employs case studies and structured interviews.” No, those are your methods. Unless you’re citing Popper or Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend or Blaug or Mäki you probably don’t have a methodology section.

If only econometricians could speak English as well as Greek.