The Scientific Laboratory Report
The handout given describes how to write a scientific laboratory report. The laboratory report will roughly take the form of a scientific publication. In this handout, I will describe the rules that govern the format and writing style that will be expected in the report.
Why should we write a Lab Report?
The goal of the laboratory report is to convey your results and interpretations to the scientific community. As well, it is a forum by which the scientific community can then also review your results, and either accept your interpretations, or provide alternative interpretations.
Thus, as the main author of your report, you must…
- Determine what question you are asking scientifically.
- Understand what it is you are testing in your experiment(s)
- Understand how you are testing your question.
- Determine how you collect data
- Determine how you interpret data
As you go through this handout, you will notice that most of the information should already be going into your laboratory notebook as you go along. Therefore, if you keep a detailed notebook, then you should be able to generate a clear laboratory report. The sections that will be part of your laboratory report are as follows:
1. Title Page
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. Materials and Methods
5. Results
6. Discussion
Title:
The title should be no longer than a sentence long, and should describe the main finding of the report. It should be on a separate page and should be written as follows:
Title of Investigation
Names of students in the Group (writer’s name first)
Course name and number
Day/Time of Lab
The Abstract:
The abstract is a short, succinct paragraph that provides an overview of the work that is going to be discussed in the report. The abstract should summarize the question being asked in the report, as well as the purpose and significance of why you are doing the experiment. Also, included in the abstract, are a summarization of the major findings of the work, and the major conclusions of the work. The abstract should stand alone, and make clear sense to the reader, as it is the reader’s first introduction to the work.
The Introduction:
This section of the report should contain any information that is important for understanding the work you will be presenting. This will give the reader a basis to understand what experiments were performed, and why they were performed. Such important information might be describing the genotypes and the corresponding phenotypes. Also, tell the reader why you chose to do the experiments you are doing, and why the experiments are interesting. Also, and very importantly, in your introduction, describe your hypothesis and justify it. Describe why you think the hypothesis you have described is valid. It is often easiest to write this section last.
Materials and Methods:
This should contain a few paragraphs of text that provide enough information such that the experiments you performed can be repeated by someone else. For this, write your own text! Do not copy from procedures handed to you. Materials: Give complete taxonomic information about the organisms used, and specifically how the organisms you used were obtained. Methods: Describe the procedures you used in detail. Do not forget details such as temperature you grew your strains at, or pH of solutions you used. Be as succinct as possible. Do not add any unnecessary information, as someone may use this procedure in the future. Also do not used the active voice to write your methods, use the passive voice. For instance, do not say I performed the experiment at…. You should say, the experiments were performed at… Also, do not refer the reader to any other section of the report.
The Results:
This is the most important part of the report, and should be the meat of the report. This should contain text describing what you did, and the actual data upon which you draw conclusions in detail. Therefore, despite the name of the section, the results section actually contains more than just the experimental results you generated. The results section should also tell the reader, how the experiment(s) were carried out. This will give the reader a frame of reference from which to think critically about your work. For instance, you might say that in order to determine the mechanism of inheritance of the white eye allele, we first crossed eight white eye females by….. Then you can go into the results of that cross. Results will be described, but it is also useful to see the actual data in tabular format or as a figure. Therefore, try to incorporate the figure(s) or table(s) within the body of the text. If you show them in a table or figure, then you must reference that table or figure in the text. Also each figure should be labeled with a number and should have a legend to help the reader understand the data being shown. This section should read as if you were telling a story of your results. Therefore, present the data in a logical order, and do not go into any unnecessary detail. In this section, you can use a more active voice (such as I/we removed flies etc.). Also, since you already did the work, use the past tense. You should state your interpretation of the data, but refrain from discussing it in larger context, as that is an important part of your discussion section.
The Discussion:
This section essentially acts as the conclusion section of your report. Put together all the data you have collected, and determine what you have learned. I.e. for your fly crosses, discuss the information from both the F1 and F2 and what that means. Refer back to your data, and how it all fits together to a conclusion. Compare your results to what you would have expected. If you get unexpected results, explain what might have happened to get those results. Also, summarize whether you had any technical problems with the project. Additionally, you should accept or reject your hypothesis that you stated at the outset. If you rejected your hypothesis, then refer back to the data that you are using to reject the initial hypothesis. Be aware that noting is proven in science. The data only supports or does not support the hypothesis, it NEVER proves. Lastly, you might add some information about what you might think is important to experimentally test next.