A formal laboratory report is a piece of formal writing that is intended to explain to people from a variety of backgrounds – from those interested in the area but not experts in the area to those who are experts in the field – what you have done.

You will need to convey concisely,

• Why you have completed the experiment/study.
• How you have completed the experiment/study.
• What your results are.
• What you have learnt from your results (and how you explain your results).
• How you can build on from your study.

Scientific reports are formally structured in a particular manner, and typically follow the following order:^[1]

• Abstract.
• Introduction.
• Methods.
• Results.
• Discussion.
• Conclusion.
• Bibliography.

Sometimes the results and discussions sections are combined in a laboratory report – this depends on the nature of your data and how you would like to structure your report.^[2]

Getting Help

You may seek help with your formal report from the IU East Writing Center as well as the Math and Science Resource Center, and you may discuss your reports with other students. Your laboratory instructor will be more than happy to help you with your report, but will not pre-grade draft reports.

An example of a formal laboratory report is included in the Appendix.

Academic Honesty

While you are more than welcome to seek help with your report, it must represent your own, individual work and be written in your own words. Failure to write the report in your own words, as determined by your instructor, are violations of the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities. The recommended penalty will at least be a zero on the lab report. Copying out of the laboratory manual or any supplements provided is expressly forbidden.

Scientific Writing

Unlike some other disciplines, in science we pride ourselves on writing concisely. We learn about what is in the paper in as direct a manner as possible. Extra words in a sentence are unwelcome, and repetition is also not a good thing. While correct use of scientific terminology is expected and required, the use of overcomplicated words for the sake of doing so is inappropriate. Another common error is to be overtly verbose and write in a trivializing manner such as “I did this then I did that”.

In terms of sentence construction, the first person (I or we) is used judiciously.^[3]   To quote the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication:

Use first person when it helps to keep your meaning clear and to express a purpose or a decision.

Avoid clauses such as “we believe”, “we feel”, and “we can see”, as well as personal opinions.

Examples of what to avoid:

• Jones reported xyz, but I (or we) found …
• I (or we) present here a detailed study …
• My (or our) recent work demonstrated …
• To determine the effects of structure on photophysics, I (or we) …

The second person is almost never appropriate.

It is also important to be careful with tense construction: past tense should be used to describe what you have done, while the present tense should be used to discuss what is currently true.

While it is occasionally appropriate to use a list format, everything must be written out in full sentences and be written in full paragraph format. While lab procedures in the manual are written typically in bullet point, step-by-step format for convenience and ease of use, in formal reports they should be written in paragraph format.

Suggested Workflow for Writing a Formal Report

While a formal report will have the order of sections given above, it is rather difficult to write a report in that order sometimes. Therefore, we suggest that you write your report in this order:

• Write the methods and results sections first. This is relatively well-defined and are relatively factual, and allow you to reflect on what you did
• Write the discussion section. This builds from your results and should explain what your results are about.
• Write the conclusion. This should follow from your discussion.
• Now that you know the take-home lessons and context for the study, you can work on writing up the introduction.
• Finally, summarize the report by writing the abstract.

At the end of the day, you can write your report in any order you wish – it’s just a matter of personal preference. However, you should be aware that however you do it, it will likely take several rounds of revisions to write a good formal report. While spell-check may help, many scientific words are wrongly marked as being wrongly spelt, while other misspellings and certainly poor/incorrect wording is not addressed.

What to Include in a Formal Report

Here, we describe what is found in each section of a formal report. An example of a formal report is provided here.

Title

The title should briefly outline the subject of the report.

Abstract

This is a one-paragraph outline (typically under 250 words^[4]) of what you did in this experiment and the main conclusions from the study. It should provide sufficient information for a reader to decide if the article is relevant or not. If quantifiable data is an important outcome for the experiment, it should be included.

You should be as succinct as possible in the abstract. If it can be said in less words, do so!

Introduction

Here, you should describe

• why the subject is worth studying,
• what the goals of the experiment are, and
• explain the background theory behind your experiment.

One way of writing an introduction is to consider an inverted triangle.  In the first half of the introduction, you are trying to provide scientific context for your report.

1. Describe the most general motivation for studying the topic associated with the experiment in your report (not just “In order to fulfill the course requirements …”!).
2. As you go on, narrow down to the problem you have studied – explain why you are studying that topic and give the context for studying this problem.

Once you have laid out the scientific context, you can complete the inverted triangle by explaining what you have done in this study and how it addresses the problem that you have identified.  You may choose to also foreshadow what your results show.

Methods

The methods section should provide sufficient detail such that someone who is reasonably familiar with your area (say, an A student in this course) should be able to replicate your methods and reproduce your results.

While you need to provide sufficient detail for this, you should not provide anything that is considered to be “good laboratory practice” or extraneous data. Anything that can be assumed to be known by someone proficient in the laboratory (but unfamiliar with your work) should be assumed to be known.

This section should be written in the past tense, in full sentences and without copying the laboratory manual; it should be written in your own words.

Also, unlike in the laboratory manual, we typically do not list all the equipment needed or used at the beginning of the article.  The golden rule is that if someone has a good understanding of the lab course they should be able to do the experiment based on this description.

Results^[5]

In this section, present your experimental data clearly and concisely. Here, you should use tables or graphs as appropriate. In most cases, tables and/or graphs will be essential. Graphs are particularly useful for illustrating trends in your results, while tables are useful for listing a number of different values, especially when these are important results. In any case, there should be a paragraph or two of text describing your results. When tables and figures are used to illustrate your results (or anywhere else) they should be referenced in the text.

You are not expected to show your work in a formal report – just the major experimental results.^[6] You should not explain your results here; that can be left for the discussion and conclusion sections.

Discussion

This is an important section that depends heavily on the results you obtained and the experiment you did. Here, you are expected to explain your results and describe what you have found out. In particular, explain the extent to which your data supports (or fails to support) your hypothesis. You should attempt to explain any anomalous results and identify sources of error – with suggestions of possible improvements to help resolve these problems.

Conclusion

In a brief paragraph, conclude by summarizing the main scientific conclusions from your study – these should already be developed in your results and discussions sections.  You should also suggest in one sentence future work that may serve as a follow-up to the experiment that is performed.

Some Final Comments

In this course, one of our goals is to help you learn how to structure and write scientific reports. Therefore,

• In CHEM-C 125, we will start with some exercises that are designed to illustrate scientific writing style. We then follow by having weekly writing assignments that illustrate the experiments. Under each week’s laboratory materials, there are guidelines on what to do for each week’s writing assignments. This cumulates in you putting together a formal report on your research project.
• In CHEM-C 126, you will write a formal report on two experiments.
• You will be required to write formal reports in other laboratory courses such as CHEM-C 486 Biochemistry Laboratory.

For each formal report, the grading rubric is attached to Canvas via the Assignments tool. We suggest that you use this rubric to evaluate your own formal reports before submission. Note that while the point total fluctuates from semester to semester the criteria by which you are assessed does not vary.