Writing lab reports in Bio 40

The primary way that scientists communicate their research is through written papers, published in peer-reviewed journals. Although we won’t be publishing our research in Bio 40, you should be learning to write in the appropriate style so that this form of communication becomes more natural to you. This brief guide should help you to understand the style and what is expected of you. I have also included a checklist as a quick, additional guide. I also encourage you to use the peer review rubric for Introductions and the peer review rubric for papers to help guide your writing.

Throughout this guide, examples will be given for a hypothetical experiment in which we are trying to determine why a flashlight does not work.

General writing

Please proofread your work very carefully. Although your paper will be peer-reviewed, I encourage you to go to the success center for help with grammar, spelling, and content organization.

You should write lab reports using a passive voice. This means that you should not use “I” or “we” bur rather state that something was done. For example “The switch on each of 3 flashlights was tested by repeatedly moving them between the ‘on’ and ‘off’ positions”. When you read scientific papers, you may notice that the 1st person singular (“I”) or plural (“we”) is often used in biological journals. However, for this course, you should write using a passive voice.

You should write some parts of the lab reports in the present tense, and some in the past tense. Present tense should be used in the introduction and discussion when you are writing about things that are always, or generally, true (eg. “Flashlights are particularly useful because they operate on batteries and are therefore portable.”). However, for things you did (such as you describe in the methods section), you should write in the past tense (eg. “The battery was tested to determine if it held a charge by…”). This is also true for results (eg. “The bulb became bright after the switch was moved to the ‘on’ position”).

General Formatting

In general, you should concentrate your efforts on content rather than formatting. However, clear, consistent formatting can help you and your reader understand the structure of your paper, which will make it easier to read (and write). I strongly encourage you to begin to use “styles” when you write – both for this course and others. Styles help define the format of text, such as subheading being Calibri, 12 point font, boldface, and aligned to the left margin. Styles help you to establish a consistent look and feel for your document and in turn guide your readers through it. Styles are available in any word processor such as MS Word, Google Docs, Apple’s Pages, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

You should use a level 1 heading style for the title and a level 2 heading style for subheadings like “Introduction” or “Methods”. Format these so that they are slightly bigger and bolder than the main text. This will help the reader identify the structure of your document.

You do not need a cover page for any labs in this class – they just waste paper if you print.

Please use a 12-point font that is easy to read.

Use wide margins of at least an inch. This gives space for comments.

Use correct symbols. There will be many times when the symbol that you want to use is not on the keyboard. Use the word processor to insert the correct symbol. For example, you will be measuring things in microliters, for which the abbreviation is “μl”. Use the Greek letter “mu” rather than a “u” that you find on the keyboard. The same applies to the degrees symbol (°).

Figures and Tables

Every figure and table in your paper should be labeled with a descriptive caption. They should be labeled sequentially from the first to the last and each one of them should be referred to in your text (eg. “See Figure 1”). Figures and tables are different and each should have their own numbering. For tables, place the caption above the table and for figures, place the caption below. Do not wrap text around the figure or table – allow it to take up the full width of the paper as needed.

Sections of your lab reports

Title

Give your paper a good title. It should be long enough to be descriptive and often include a hint about what your results are. For example, “Replacing an old battery with a new battery restores functionality in flashlights” would be a good title that includes the findings of your study. It should not include a phrase like “The effects of X on Y”.

Authors

Your name should be the first author. Your partners’ names should immediately follow your own.

Introduction

Imagine that your paper is an hourglass (Figure 1). It is broad at the top and bottom and narrow in the middle. Similarly, the introduction of your paper will be broad at the beginning, and get narrower toward the end of the introduction. For example, at the beginning, you might want to explain what a flashlight is, what it is used for, and why it is useful. As you work your way through the introduction, start to narrow the focus (How do you use a flashlight, how does it work). By the end of the introduction, you should introduce some specific concepts that you will address in the experiment (What are different ways in which flashlights malfunction?). Your research hypotheses should be right near the end of the introduction. Research hypotheses will be very specific and narrow in focus. You will learn how to write a proper research hypothesis in the course before your first lab report is due.

In your introduction, you will need to convince your readers that they should invest the time and energy into reading your paper. People’s time is very valuable so if you can’t demonstrate that your study is worth reading, they won’t read it.

Methods

In this section, you should describe what you did. Use the past tense. For many of the labs, you will be given step-by-step instructions. However, you must not copy those. Instead, write what you did and why you did it in paragraph form.

You should remember that your audience is other scientists. Therefore don’t include very mundane details such as “10 flashlights were labeled with the group name and the age of the battery”. However, don’t miss out important details such as “The voltages of 10 batteries of varying age were tested in a voltmeter.”

Write your methods in prose, don’t use bullet points or numbers.

Include WHY you did things. This helps the reader follow what you are describing. (“In order to determine whether the replacement battery was fresh, the voltage of each was measured with a voltmeter”).

Results

Describe any trends in your results with prose and refer to tables and figures. This section should begin with prose and refer to tables and figures for details and visual representation of those data. Describe any data manipulations that you did, and describe any calculations. For example: “None of the flashlights worked when used with batteries manufactured prior to 2010, however most flashlights did work with newer batteries so long as the batteries could hold a charge of at least … (Table X)”.

Present your results but don’t draw conclusions from them – you will use the discussion section for this. For example, you may say “Flashlights were brighter when used with newer batteries (Figure X)” but you shouldn’t say “Flashlights were brighter when used with newer batteries, demonstrating that the charge in the battery is dissipated while the battery sits on the shelf.”

Every table or figure should have a label and caption such as “Figure 1: The relationship between battery age and the charge it can hold”. Labels and captions for tables should be above the table, and those for figures should be below the figure.

You should refer to every table and figure in your text (eg. “Flashlights were more successfully repaired with new batteries than with old batteries (Figure 1 and Table 1).”)

Discussion

In this section, you should reverse the hourglass (Figure 1). Start with specific findings of your experiments and then broaden the discussion to bigger topics.

Restate and address your findings for each hypothesis you made. Explain why you think things turned out as they did.

Discuss whether there are other ways to interpret your data and any sources of experimental error and what effects they may have had on your conclusions. You should identify sources of error as random errors or systematic errors and indicate what effects they have on your results and conclusions.

Discuss how your experiment relates to other aspects of biology. You should have done this in your introduction, but re-visiting it in the discussion is entirely appropriate. It is fine to be somewhat speculative here, but make sure your readers know that you are speculating!

Literature cited

As you write, you will need to provide evidence of what you say. This comes in the form of scientific (primary literature) papers. Primary literature is the type of article that actually describes a study. Its purpose is not to summarize lots of previous work. You will know if an article is primary if it actually describes an experiment in detail and contains the results from that particular experiment.

You should back up statements with in-text citations, wherever possible. There are 2 similar ways to do this. If you haven’t yet, please look at this paper by Ye et al. (2017) to get a feel for what your writing should be like.

Method 1

In the first method, the name of the authors are included in the text (eg. “Jones et al. (1999) showed that ….”). In this method, the year of the article is within parentheses.

Method 2

In the second method, both the authors and the year are within parentheses, separated by a comma. (eg. “96% of flashlights require 2 or more batteries (Jones and Wilson, 1999)). If there are more than 2 authors, use the use the first author’s name and then the abbreviation “et al.” such as “(Jones et al., 1999)”. Note the period following ‘al.’, since the ‘al’ in ‘et al.’ is an abbreviation. The phrase ‘et al.’ means “and others”. In some journals, in-text citations are numbered and indicated with a superscript. Please don’t use this format – it is more difficult to read and maintain the numbers within your document.

The literature cited section must be formatted properly as you will have learned by the time you write any lab reports for the class. You should have at least one in-text citation for each item in your literature cited section.

I strongly encourage you to learn to use a bibliography manager. I recommend Zotero, though there are others, both free and pricey. Please don’t use the web service EasyBib. It does NOT format citations properly. They even make mistakes on their help page on how to do citations!

Final Comments

This is a college-level science class, and as such, I am most interested in what you have to say about the science that you conducted. However, the ability to communicate is important and so some credit will be given for your ability to effectively communicate your ideas. If you write well, I will be able to concentrate my efforts on the science as well, and you’ll get more out of my comments. I strongly encourage you to get help with your writing at the success center. There are very few students who would not benefit greatly from this.