APPENDIX I: LAB REPORTS
The purpose of the lab reports is to give you experience in analyzing and interpreting data, as well as in presenting a description of your research using clear, concise writing. While this is initially intimidating for many students, the goal is to familiarize you with the process. You will find that if you follow some basic steps for the general structure of the lab report, the writing and analysis process will be much easier. Here are some strategic hints for writing your reports:
1) Give yourself time. Data analysis, graph preparation, background research, thoughtful writing, and attention to the formatting criteria (below) WILL take more than one evening. DO NOT wait until the night before it is due to start your report.
2) Before sitting down to write a report, think carefully about what ecological question or phenomenon the lab exercise addressed, and then go over your data to see what conclusions can be drawn from them. It may help to think of the lab report as a written argument in which you state a question, present data relevant to that question, and then try to convince readers of the conclusions you have drawn.
3) Prepare an outline of each section with the important criteria to be included or points you want to make. Use the suggestions below as a guideline. That way, you won't accidentally leave out important components and needlessly lose points.
4) Write at least two drafts. I like to write one draft then let it sit for a day or two. When I read it over again with a fresh head, it is much easier to see what is clear and what is not.
5) If you are having difficulty structuring or communicating your ideas, we urge you to take advantage of the services offered by the Writing Center (Wilson Library 324, 650-3219), especially for help with early drafts. Of course, we are also glad to offer advice if you are struggling.
ORDER OF REPORT SECTIONS
As with most scientific papers, each report should contain particular sections, in a particular order. You are expected to follow this order, as outlined below. Lab reports that do not follow this simple outline will be returned to you as unacceptable.
Section Points
1. Title 3
2. Abstract 7
3. Text
Introduction 15
Methods 15
Results 15
Discussion 25
4. References 5
5. Tables
6. Figure legends
7. Figures 15 for tables, figure legends and figures.
Total = 100
Text sections should be delineated with appropriate headings. You can have subheadings within each section if necessary, but be consistent with how they are structured. The use of subheadings can be very effective, particularly if the research features several components that are pieced together to form a cohesive story.
SECTION CONTENT
This section describes the basic components of each section of the lab report. Failure to incorporate these minimal suggestions will result in loss of points.
Title
- The title should be a meaningful description of the study you did; it should not just repeat the lab title from this manual.
- You can put the title at the top of the first page of text or have a separate title page.
- Of course, don't forget to put your name beneath the title!
Abstract
- This is an overview of the major points of the whole lab report
- It should be approximately 250-300 words long.
- It should summarize the context, questions, results and major conclusions. Often you can put together key statements from the intro, methods, results, and discussion to construct your abstract. Of course, you will need to smooth out the writing to make it flow.
Introduction
- This should act as a "funnel", starting out with the big context and gradually focusing in towards the specific questions that you will be addressing.
- Give a brief description of the context of the experiment. What big question(s) motivated this investigation?
- Present the primary hypotheses or objectives of the experiment.
- Give a brief description of the experimental system: what organisms or ecosystems were studied?
- In this section, and throughout the paper, try to write in the active voice rather than the passive voice.
Methods
- The general purpose of a methods section is to describe your procedures in a manner that would allow readers to reconstruct your study.
- You must include sufficient detail so that someone coming to repeat your experiment could figure out exactly what to do. At the same time, you don't need to repeat everything in the lab manual.
- Things to describe:
What treatments were used?
What was the experimental design?
What variables were measured?
What procedures were followed?
If it is relevant, describe the field site and the weather conditions.
Don’t just regurgitate the lab manual, because often procedures can differ once we get into the field or lab.
- For minor details of procedure that are described exactly in the lab manual, just cite the manual rather than redescribing them all.
- Be sure to describe any differences from the procedure outlined in the lab manual.
Results
- In this section, you should clearly describe your results both verbally and with figures and tables that summarize the general patterns in the data.
- You should avoid interpreting how particular results relate to the original question - save that for the Discussion section. Simply present the results in the Results section.
- Most of the labs involve multiple weeks, sometimes with different foci from week to week. Clearly differentiate between discrete blocks of work, but write with the idea of synthesizing them in the discussion.
- You can organize your results in whatever way is scientifically logical to make the points you want to make in the discussion. Sometimes this may be chronological, but not always.
- In the written portion of this section, be sure to refer to all tables and figures in the text.
- Coordinate your written results section with the presentation order of tables and figures (see section below).
- Where appropriate, you need to state the statistical significance of the differences among treatments, for example, as tested by t-tests or regression. These are very simple measures of differences among treatments, which we will cover in class. Either present the statistics, including level of significance, in the text or include them in a table. In describing your results, it is not sufficient to just say "Treatment 1 was higher than than Treatment 2", without also describing whether or not those differences are statistically significant.
Discussion
- Synthesize your findings. Start by thinking about the major points you want to make, and build from there.
- Did you accept or reject your hypotheses?
- What do your results say about the big questions that originally motivated the study?
- How do your results relate to other findings in this area? Describe any similarities and explain any differences.
- Be sure to cite appropriate references.
References
- All sources for ideas must be cited. See discussion of plagiarism, below.
- You can cite the lab book for methods.
- In addition to the lab book, you must draw on at least three outside sources for the introduction and discussion of your report. These references may include your textbook or other books or peer-reviewed scientific journal articles from the library or on reserve. "Peer-reviewed" simply means that other scientists have commented on the appropriateness of the methods and conclusions prior to publication.
- While you can use web sites for additional information, they must be cited properly (see below) and web sites do not count towards the three source minimum. Very few web sites have any kind of peer-review process to ensure high standards of scientific methodology. If you have questions about a particular site, contact your professor.
- Proper citation style is expected and is illustrated below. If you have any questions about this, look in any recent issue of the journal Ecology for examples.
Citation style within the text
When you are writing and use ideas that you gained from other sources, you need to acknowledge this by putting the authors' names and the date of their publication in the sentence. For example:
"Five interacting 'state-factors' typically influence the process of soil formation. These are climate, organisms, topography, parent material, and time (Jenny 1980)."
or:
"MacArthur (1972) has suggested that there are more species where the environment is complex and therefore more easily subdivided."
How you list the authors names in the text depends on how many authors there are:
One author (Jenny 1980)
Two authors (Smith and Jones 1897)
Three or more authors (Aber et al. 1989)
You should NOT include a page reference in the text citation for most journal articles (this will happen in the REFERENCES section at the end of your lab report). You MAY include a page number if you pulled a specific quote, fact or other tidbit of knowledge from a large book.
Citation style in the "References" section at the end
Journal article
Aber, J. D., J. K. Nadelhoffer, P. A. Steudler, and J. M. Melillo. 1989. Nitrogen saturation in northern forest ecosystems - hypotheses and implications. BioScience 39: 378-386.
Book
Jenny, H. 1980. Soil Genesis with Ecological Perspectives. Springer-Verlag, New York, New York, USA.
Edited book
Mooney, H. A., W. E. Winner, and E. J. Pell, eds. Response of Plants to Multiple Stresses. Academic Press, San Diego.
Chapter from an edited book
Chapin, F. S., III. 1991. Effects of multiple environmental stresses on nutrient availability and use. Pages 67-88 in Mooney, H. A., W. E. Winner, and E. J. Pell, eds. 1991. Response of Plants to Multiple Stresses. Academic Press, San Diego.
Web sites
Author, Web site or article title, full web address
Tables, figures, and figure legends
- The purpose of figures and tables is to provide a quick visual summary of the data. Data should be presented with both means and some estimation of the amount of variation (standard error is best, but standard deviation is also fine).
- DO NOT SHOW THE RAW DATA.
- Do not duplicate data in tables and figures – use only one or the other for any given set of numbers.
- Number tables and figures according to the order in which you refer to them in the text (e.g., Table 1 is the first table referred to, Table 2 next, etc.).
- Include only tables and figures that you describe in the text.
- Make sure to label the axes of all figures, including units of measure (e.g. Distance, m).
- Pay attention to the scale of axes in figures. Choosing a very small scale (for example a temperature range of 11.9-13.2) will exaggerate what is in fact a minor difference among treatments into a difference that appears much greater.
- Most journals accept only black and white figures; this format is completely acceptable for this class. Be sure any lines or bars from different treatments are easily distinguishable from each other.
- If you decide to use color figures, that is also fine. Color is now commonly used in a variety of situations (posters, slides, computer presentations, even some journals), so you are welcome to experiment with this format. Here are a couple of guidelines to follow with color figures:
1) color can help get your message across, but too many different colors or wild color schemes can be more confusing than helpful;
2) as with B&W, make sure lines and bars from different treatments are easily distinguishable;
3) pick a simple color scheme and stick with that format throughout;
4) many people - especially men - are red/green color blind, so it is not advisable to use both of those colors as the basis of your color scheme.
- Each table and figure should have a short descriptive legend that explains any abbreviations, symbols, lines, categories, etc. The table or figure legend must give enough information so that someone can interpret your table or figure without having to read the text.
- Put table legends at the top of each table.
- Figure legends go on a separate page, after the tables but before the figures themselves (see Order, above). Alternatively, you can put each figure legend beneath the appropriate figure.
REPORT LENGTH AND PRESENTATION
- Grades will reflect your analysis and interpretation of data as well as the clarity and conciseness of your writing.
- The text section should not exceed 6 double spaced pages in 12 point font, with one inch margins all the way around - we need room to write comments.
- Reports should be printed single-sided, but in the interest of minimizing paper waste, feel free to use the back of paper that has already had printing on one side – as long as your text, figures and tables are clear and legible.
- Presentation is important to the extent that it helps to understand your data and ideas, but fanciness is not necessary (i.e., you will be graded on the quality of your data analysis and writing, not on how nice your binder is - sorry, Calvin).
PLAGIARISM AND WORKING IN GROUPS
Plagiarism is not tolerated. All writing must be your own (including table and figure legends) and any ideas not your own must be properly cited. We encourage you to work within your lab group to analyze the data, figure out the best way to make graphs, interpret your results, and discuss what they mean. But when it comes to writing the report, you must do that on your own. If there are blocks of text in common between multiple lab reports, all people involved will get no credit for the lab report Similarly, if you lift full sentences or paragraphs of text from other souces (books, articles, lab manual, web sites), you will also get no credit for the lab report. With proper citation style, and writing ideas in your own words, there should be no reason for plagiarism to happen.