1. Preparing a Laboratory Report RF Lauff, M.Sc. Part-time Faculty and Senior Laboratory Instructor Biology Department St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS

2. Overview A laboratory report should be written as if you were writing a real scientific paper. Therefore, it may be very convenient for you to have a real scientific paper beside you for reference as you write. This tutorial will use the above research paper as an example of a properly formatted work. Bear in mind that formatting styles vary for different journals, and likewise, for different courses.

3. Title – etc. brief phenomenon (phenomena) being described animal(s) involved authorship ID number, course, date Please don’t use a separate page for this!

4. The Abstract This section starts off with one phrase or sentence describing the goal of the paper The major technique(s) are briefly mentioned The results are itemized The conclusions are drawn Only rarely are citations made here. You likely won’t encounter this. Likewise, statistics are not normally mentioned here.

5. Goal investigated Major technique Results Concluding Remarks

6. Introduction Never refer to the results of your experiment in this section! Synopsis of known information LOTS of citations!

8. Introduction, continued Given all that you’ve just described, tell the reader what your experiment is about!

10. Methods and Materials categorize! cite equations

11. categorize! cite

12. Methods and Materials, continued

13. In addition to statistics, how you treat your data in other ways goes in the Methods as well. How do you deal with outliers? How did you process the data e.g. software? Did you not use any of the data for other reasons? You must justify those reasons…remember, you can’t pick reject data just because they don’t fit your ideas.

14. Results Keep categorizing! TEXT FIGURES

15. Results, continued almost robotic description of the figures and tables but NO interpretation i.e. no physiological explanations the text should be descriptive enough to provide a mental picture of the graph i.e. given just the text, the reader should be able to draw a decent representation of the graph

16. Results, continued Tutorials on graphing and creating a table are available as links from the lab’s webpage: http://www.stfx.ca/people/rlauff/304/304.htmlhttp://www.stfx.ca/people/rlauff/304/304.html. Do NOT rely on software defaults to create effective graphs!

17. font too small no borders no background colour no line colours

18. The Discussion categorize! this is where you explain the physiology!

19. Acknowledgements thank the people who helped you out.

20. The point of a lab report is to… communicate your research! http://www.stfx.ca/people/rlauff/teaching/write.htmlwww.stfx.ca/people/rlauff/teaching/write.html