Chemistry 160
"LABORATORY 11"
Introduction To Scientific Report Writing
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No pre-laboratory assignment.

OBJECTIVE: This "laboratory" is designed to introduce you to the art and practice of scientific report writing. Whatever your eventual employment, it is certain that you will have to submit many written reports on your work. Preferred report styles vary greatly from employer to employer or from scientific journal to journal. However, all scientific reports have certain features in common. Information should be expressed clearly, and enough information (or citations to related literature sources) given to enable the reader to understand and reproduce, if necessary, what you did. The variations in the form of scientific reports represent different approaches to achieving these basic goals.

PROCEDURE: You will select one of the laboratories you have completed in the laboratory (except Introduction to Statistical Treatment of Data or Introduction to Graphing Techniques). You will then write up this laboratory in the form of a formal scientific report, using the format described below. The report should be 5-10 pages in length, and typewritten or otherwise clearly legible. This is not intended to be an exercise in English composition. However, knowledge without the ability to communicate it clearly is useless. Therefore, reports turned in with an unacceptable number of grammatical, spelling, or other composition errors will be returned to you for revision. Your report will not be graded and credit given until it is submitted in a satisfactory condition. An incomplete (rather than a grade of zero for the laboratory) will be given until an acceptable report is turned in.

FORMAT: The format for your report essentially follows the accepted format for a professional article in the journal Analytical Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society. Your report should conform to this standard: consult any issue of Analytical Chemistry for examples. Detailed instructions (called "Notes to Authors") are published in the first issue of the journal each year. The standard format contains the following items:

  1. Abstract: A 50-200 word summary of what you actually studied and what your results were.
  2. Introduction: This section gives background information on the work, explaining the principles and theories behind the procedures used, and why the work was important to do. Include pertinent citations from the scientific literature, in standard American Chemical Society format. You may cite the laboratory manual and/or the modular laboratory instructions for part of this information, but you should also go beyond these sources.
  3. Experimental: This section contains detailed "how to" instructions for each procedure that you used. You should summarize the instructions from the laboratory manual(s) rather than including all the details. The idea is to include enough citations and information to enable the reader to reproduce your experiments.
  4. Results: You present your actual results in this section, using tables and graphs where appropriate ("one picture worth one thousand words"). This section is often combined with the Discussion into a single section, depending on the nature of the data (would it be better to explain the data as you present it, in order for the reader to understand the results?).
  5. Discussion: Discuss the significance of your results. What do they mean? What do they imply in the "bigger picture"?
  6. Conclusion: 1-2 paragraphs summarizing your results and their importance. The purpose behind this section is that many readers will not be interested in repeating your experiment or learning all the details, but they will want to know the "punch-line" of the work. When most people read the scientific literature, they read the abstract and if it sounds interesting, they jump to this section. If they're REALLY intrigued, they'll then read the whole report in detail. Thus, this section plus the Abstract is where you need to do your best "sales job" to convince the reader that you've done something interesting and important.
  7. References: The list of literature references that you cited in the report, following standard formats.

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Friday, October 03, 2003