How to write a lab report BIO 101L

in this lecture I am going to go over how to write a lab report and you will need to know this when you write your lab report for the yeast respiration lab that you are doing this week in intro bio specifically you will rate a lab report on procedure 12.1 production of carbon dioxide during anaerobic fermentation when you rate this lab report you are only responsible for the following sections you need to rate the introduction the results section width of figure and the literature cited sections this means that you are omitting the methods section you’ve already practiced writing a method section for a different lab and so we are not going to ask for you to do it here when you rate this lab report you will do well if you use the lab report guide which is on blackboard as instructions and use the examples therein to help make sure that you are using the proper formatting and style if you do this you will probably do very well on this assignment if you don’t then you probably will not do as well as you hope so one more reminder please use the lab report guide we are going to go over the general setup of a lab report now so in a lab report there are several sections each section needs to have its own heading for example when you wrote your materials and methods section you have a heading that said either methods or materials and methods that will be true for the other sections you’re doing this time as well your first section will be the introduction and the traduction has two primary parts the first part is a description of the nature and background of the problem in other words you’re telling the reader what is already known about the system or the question that we are investigating and since you’re telling the reader about things that are already known you should cite previous work from other scientists in this section when you write the introduction the background information must be paraphrased this means it should be in your own words you should not use quotes generally in scientific writing especially lab reports we never use quotes when you give the introduction it doesn’t have to be super long we are probably looking at an introduction that is two or three paragraphs long for this assignment so give the reader just enough pertinent information to orient the reader it would be in the discussion section where you would talk about the background in more depth in comparison to your own results here’s an example of a introduction from a different sort of lab loggerhead turtles kureta kureta are the most common turtle in the Mediterranean Sea and their biology has been described by Miller 1997 they nest on the eastern Basin Shores mainly in Greece from nesting sites hatchling moved to the open ocean foraging on the surface then start a developmental migration towards near shore and continental shelf waters sexually mature turtles moved to specific meeting and nesting sites during the breeding system what I want you to notice here is first I gave the name of the organism being studied and I gave it’s properly formatted scientific name notice two that I told you at the very beginning of this paragraph from where I was getting this information I did not save this citation for the end instead I front loaded it so you would understand that the remaining material from the paragraph was also coming from this source I gave the author’s name as well as the year of publication and we’ll talk more about the specific arrangement of this information in a subsequent slide notice too that this is all in my own words none of these sentences are direct quotes from Miller the second part of the introduction here is where you are going to state the objectives of your study so you’re transitioning from what’s already known to what do you seek to find out in your own work so in this section you are going to explicitly state the purpose of our study and you will state a question probably a general question that you are asking as well as more specific hypotheses being tested and if you have done all of this then the second part of your introduction is going to concisely state why you are performing the investigation now relevant to the specific study you’re doing here with respiration it’s a complex study you’re not just testing one hypothesis instead you are testing multiple different hypotheses this means that you will have multiple different hypothesis statements in your introductory paragraph in that second paragraph talking about the purpose of your study in the introduction you can give a very brief one sentence overview of the approach you are using but you will not describe the methods in detail because that information belongs in the methods section remember that you are not actually reading the methods section for this lab report so just sort of imagine that you did and then you are going to move on directly to the results section this is where you present your own data and statistics relevant to your data there are two general parts to this first is the narrative or the body and this is going to be a simple to the point explanation of exactly what you found you will also refer to either figures or tables and for the respiration lab report we request that you include a figure of your results so it will be a figure in this case in that pair that you’re writing the goal is to explain the figure and present any relevant data that is not represented in figures or tables remember that the reader is looking at the figure and so they already know the exact values or at least a good estimate of the exact values that you measured that means when you write this paragraph do not repeat specific data points for example do not tell me that one of the bar heights was twelve point six millimeters tall I will see that in the figure so simply tell me whether the bar was taller or shorter than other bars to which you are comparing it the body of your results is a narrative and so it needs to be written in coherent paragraph form the first sentence should give us some idea of what’s coming as well as contained pertinent information and all of the other sentences should have substantive information the reader needs to know you need to report any statistical analyses for our purposes this is going to mean statements of what differences are statistically significant and implicitly which ones also are not statistically significant in the results section you are not going to do any interpretation interpreting your results would belong in a discussion section which would come after the results so here you are just very concisely telling us what you found you’re not telling us anything about what it means or whether the results were expected or unexpected for this particular lab you are going to imagine that you have written a results or a discussion section and that you explained the meaning and interpretation of the results there we will not actually ask you to break that section for this lab but that is where the information would go if you were doing so in the results do not describe the methods again that information would have gone in the materials and methods section do not tell us anything subjective about your data for example don’t tell us whether your result was good don’t tell us whether your result was unexpected or not real simply state what you found you could in the discussion section tell us something about your interpretation of the quality of the results if you were reading that section when you rate your results for the respiration study you’re doing this week you should explain your results in the structure that parallels your hypotheses this will make it easy for the reader to follow so what does this mean imagine that in the introduction you hypothesized that treatment a would increase the rate of fermentation relative to treatment B if you made that hypothesis whatever a and B are then in the results you will need to have a sentence that indicates whether in fact a did increase the respiration rate relative to B and if it did you would also need to specify whether the difference between the two groups was large enough that it was statistically significant this term will appear a lot sentences will typically say there was a difference between a and B and it was statistically significant or the difference between a and B was in the Direction hypothesized however the difference was not statistically significant and you are going to repeat a statement like this for each of your hypotheses it’s okay if the reading is boring um you don’t get bonus points for changing sentence structure just make it really easy to follow and is similar to the actual hypotheses as possible after the results section would be the discussion but you are not responsible for reading the discussion for this week’s lab so instead you are going to go directly on to your literature cited section the literature cited is where you list all of the scientific articles or books that you actually referred to in the body of your lab report so anything that you mentioned in the introduction or discussion here are some general rules for literature cited first you can only cite scientific journals and books you are not allowed to cite websites unless your instructor specifically allows you to do so and he should not need to for this particular lab report so if you got information from infectious bite at blogspot.com about vampire respiration it might be interesting and even useful but you are not allowed to cite it in your lab report or in your literature cited section you also cannot use popular press magazines so these are magazines written for the general public not for scientists specifically such as Newsweek or Time or Discover Magazine you are all allowed to put in your literature cited section articles that you have actually referenced in the body of your report so going back to that sample introduction that we book that way back here we explicitly referred to something that Miller in 1997 said that means Miller 1997 will have to appear somewhere in our literature cited section if you simply read background on something but you do not use that information explicitly in your lab report then it needs to be omitted from your literature cited section the citations have a specific format and the format is described in detail in the lab report guide I will briefly go over it here but please refer to the lab report guide for details the citations need to be in alphabetical order by the last name of the first author and the first author is whichever one is listed first in the publication itself you don’t get to move around author names the order of names is decided based on who did the most work so you need to keep those names in the same order as the article in which they are published you need to list all author names in the literature cited section this is different than what you’ll actually do in the body of your introduction and we’ll talk about that in a couple of slides but for this section if there are six authors you need to list all six if there are seven you need to list all seven after seven we start to make exceptions to this but it will not be relevant for this particular lab report and so is an example literature cited section you can see some of these articles have only one author but this one has two and they are both listed most of your information will come from scientific articles and the format for those are as follows names of authors such as shown here last name first for the first author comma initials and then after the first author we switched the order initials first followed by last name the final author we put an aunt before their name then their first initial of their last name and then the period after the period comes the year of publication for example 2000 then comes the article title no this only proper nouns plus the first word are capitalized so anti-predator is capitalized all of the other words are lowercase except for the proper noun which is the genus and remember scientific names are always capital lowercase capital first lowercase second and italicized that same rule holds even if it’s in the title of an article after the article title we get a period and then the journal title the journal title gets italicized and all of the important words are capitalized here we don’t capitalize articles or prepositions then we get a period we have the volume of publication followed by a colon followed by the page numbers again to get that information in a easier format find it in the lab report guide for a book we are going to do authors followed by periods followed by year period book title which is capitalized except prepositions and articles period the location of publication : the name of the publisher now let’s go back and talk about how you will cite information in the actual text of the lab report for example let’s go back to our sentence that referred to Miller 1997 in the introduction the most usual way of doing this is simply by paraphrasing the information in your own words in the sentence and then after the sentence putting a parenthesis and then the name of the author or authors followed by the year alternatively you can include the author in the actual body of the sentence if you do that then following the author or authors you need to include the year of publication for example let’s move this up Miller parentheses 1997 parentheses explains Dada Dada the rest of the information so you can see here that since we used Miller’s name in the sentence we only put the year of publication in parentheses and that goes immediately after the author’s name one if there are two authors if there are two authors then you are going to include both of their last names in the in-text citation as shown here we have anyway and Makita space 1996 what if there are three or more authors in this case we no longer list all of their names in the text of the writing we still would in the literature cited section but in the text we list only the first one followed by the Latin phrase at all at all is Latin for and others and so we are implicitly acknowledging all of the authors saying that there’s more than one but we’re only listening the name of the first one because this is Latin we will italicize it and because al is an abbreviation we put a period after it at et is not an abbreviation it’s Latin for and and so we do not put a period after that for this particular lab report you need to cite the articles that we provide for you on blackboard plus your lab book when you write scientific names remember that the first word is the genus it is capitalized and italicized the second word is the species epithet it is lower case but italicized you will need to include the name of the yeast we are using as part of your lab report the next rule varies by discipline in some subjects um such as some parts of chemistry but they would give you exactly the opposite advice and so this is always a good question to ask your instructor in a new course but for our purposes in introductory biology we want you to always use the active voice remember from English that the active voice is one where the subject of the sentence then does an action so for example if you are writing about um doing something medical you would rate I examined patients that is the active voice the passive voice would be the examination of patients was accomplished by me here the subject that’s actually doing the work is in the second half of the sentence that’s passive inactive the subject doing the work is at the start of the sentence you have already seen that I am picky about grammar and style as well as mechanics so carefully proofread your lab report after you’ve written it it is always easier to catch somebody else’s mistakes so after you have completed writing a draft of your lab report and after your classmate has already done so then I suggest exchanging papers and commenting on each other’s writing I asked you not to exchange papers or let anyone else read your draft unless you have confirmed that they have already finished reading theirs this is to prevent them from plagiarizing you because if they pledge arise you both of you can end up in trouble since it is hard for us to determine who was the original Raider and who was the plagiarize er so it is allowed and even encouraged to review each other’s work but do it after everybody has completed their initial draft you should turn in your lab report as one single document on blackboard all in one this means making your graph in Excel and then pasting your graph into the Word document then upload that entire document to blackboard it needs to be double-spaced with 12-point font such as Arial or Calibri whatever the default font is on your board processor will be okay with me this is an explicit reminder that plagiarism is not allowed and there’s a statement about this in the USC Upstate Code of Student Conduct so students caught plagiarizing materials in lab reports will be submitted for disciplinary action as outlined in that code student conduct this could be plagiarizing from a published source such as by using somebody else’s words without putting them in quotes or by paraphrasing somebody else’s ideas without giving a reference for where those ideas came from we will use plagiarism checking software on blackboard and this is one way that we can detect plagiarism we can also detect it simply by recognizing ourselves that there are similarities between reports that cannot be explained simply by the shared assignment I will reduce scores on late lab reports by 10 percent per day so if it’s about a 30-point assignment you would lose about 3 points per day um instead of winning for the last minute please plan ahead for complications and one more reminder and our lab next week we will be studying photosynthesis whether or not there is a quiz scheduled we are always allowed to give pop quizzes so you should review your respiration notes prior to lab next week and in the background there that is my cat cemani