Lab reports are written assignments that synthesize the information from one, or more typically more labs. The format of each lab report may vary, depending on the lab that was performed. The standard lab report contains sections, as follows:
A brief explanation of each section follows:
Title page: This should include the title of your experiment/ report, the author’s name (which is yours), and your lab partner’s name, and your email address. The title should indicate the subject of the experiment(s). Do not write "lab report"; write as if you were submitting your paper to a scientific journal. A separate title page is optional.
Abstract: This is a brief version of the entire paper. It is about 200 words or less, and contains a brief introduction, (methods), results and discussion. If this were a scientific paper, people scan the abstract to see what you did and found out, and to decide if your paper is worth reading. Therefore, take some time with this summary.
Objective: In some cases, an objective will be more appropriate. This is what the lab was designed to accomplish, or a brief summary of the overall laboratory without methods or specific discussion of results.
Introduction: This section is a background section on the information that leads to the scientific problem you are investigating. What is the hypothesis that is being tested? What directly relevant information is necessary to understand the hypothesis and experiment? What is not known (that you are addressing in the experiment)? What are you planning to do? How did you accomplish the result? Issues addressed here give the reader information that should be useful to the remainder of the report, such as in results and discussion.
To achieve the appropriate level of depth in your report, imagine you are writing the report to explain your experiment to a classmate in Bio 8 who has missed this entire experiment. Would you need to explain to this student what a cell or DNA is? No because they already know that. In your report lab 3ABC, you would need to explain what transformation is, how transformation efficiency is calculated, and how protein purification by column chromatography works, for example.
INSTRUCTIONS
This section should be written in passive voice. Many science journals require entire papers to be in passive voice because to some people it sounds more professional and scientific. Passive voice sentences have no explicit subject, instead the action is described as it happens to the object. For example, "the bacteria were plated onto the agar" not "I plated the bacteria", or "absorption readings were taken using the spectrophotometer" not "Fred took the absorption readings.
Results: This is a summary of what you found in words, with figures and tables as illustration. Your visual aids should have clear labels and captions, so that readers understand them. Good illustrations are worth hundreds of words to describe them. Indicate if data is from a single experiment or repeated and averaged data. Results are not listed as they chronologically appear, but rather are reported to illustrate and answer your question. Even if they are inconclusive, or did not show what you expected, they are to be presented. DO NOT interpret them in this section. Raw data will often need to be converted into meaningful data in the analysis.
Discussion: This is an interpretation of your results, and explanation of how they relate to your initial hypothesis. Did the results support your hypothesis? Draw a conclusion here. If your results are unexpected, or inconclusive, then discuss it here. What is the significance of these results? Are further experiments necessary? What did you learn? What would be the logical extension of the experiment? Be careful to organize this section well, or your readers will not be able to follow your thoughts. It is OK if that means you repeat some portions of the results section as you discuss them. Opinions and speculation are fine as long as they are labeled as such. If you have done some outside research related to your experiment, it would most likely be included here. In that case, be sure to distinguish between what you learned from your own experiments and what you learned from outside research
Questions
- to see the connections between the three-week long lab sequence and
- to further practice with the standard format of research report
Guidelines and examples for citing APA style intext referencing
In-text references should immediately follow the title, word, or phrase to which they are directly relevant, rather than appearing at the end of long clauses or sentences. In-text references should always precede punctuation marks. APA in-text citation style uses the author's last name and the year of publication, for example: (Uday, 2005). APA style has specific rules while citing works by multiple authors. Example if the paper has
One author: (Uday, 2005)
Two authors: (Uday & Mirman, 2018)
Three Authors: (Uday, Wright and Meyer 2010) Five or more authors: (Mirman et al., 2006).
Appendix: This contains your raw data, calculations, tables, etc that were generated as you performed the experiment, as well as any calculations you used to reduce your data to understandable form. Typically, a research paper does NOT contain these, but this is required for grading your lab reports. Your lab instructor can correct your mistakes in this Appendix section.
Other requirements:
The report must be typed, 1.5 line spaced and font sized 12. There is no fixed minimum or maximum length requirement. A formal report should include all the above-mentioned sections and, it would be hard to write a good report in less than 3 or 4 typed pages. The entire report should be written in past tense as the experiment was already completed.
There has to be 5 outside resources from textbooks or research articles.