Lab reports

An abstract is a very short summary of your whole report.You need to include:

• a brief summary of the context of your problem/question
• your general aim
• mention what methods you used to achieve that aim
• a brief summary of your results and what they mean.

Top Tip: Write your abstract last. Write one sentence to represent each of the main sections of your report: Introduction, Methodology, Results and Discussion. 

The introduction of your report should first link your brief, issue or question to the bigger picture of your subject. Then you should define the key concepts needed for your reader to understand your experiment and the analysis of your results.

This part of the introduction is for you to make sure your reader has all the information they need to understand the context of your experiment and why you interpreted your results the way you did. Good things to include are key literature on topic, key concepts, methods or theories you will use to interpret your results.  

Finally, you should close your introduction by clearly stating the aim and objectives, the research question or the hypotheses you have set out to investigate. 
 
Top Tip: Write your introduction at the end or re-read and edit it once you have finished your Discussion.

Here you should include what materials and methods or protocols you followed to answer your question or gather your data, as well as methods used for interpreting the results.

This section is mostly descriptive (you just narrate, step by step, what you did), however, you should include the justification behind your choice of methods as well as any information you think necessary for someone who wants to carry out an identical experiment in the future.

Top Tip: Have a research methods textbook or resource with you when you're writing this section. This can help with the pros and cons of each method.

This is probably the easiest section to write since all you need to do is describe and summarise your results for your reader. 
 
A key thing to remember in the results section is that it should be easy to find information within it.

To achieve this you can use graphs, tables, illustrations, pictures or diagrams, so that your reader is able to find the information that they need at a glance. 
 
Top Tip: Imagine you have given your report to another scientist who will be going into a meeting with your report, but they have not been able to fully read it. They should be able to go to the results and through scanning headings, tables and/or images, get the key information - even if they haven't had time to read the discussion!

This is the section where you will explain what all those raw results you've just presented to your reader mean for the question or hypotheses you were investigating. Sometimes this section can be combined with the results section. 
 
To write a good discussion make sure you:

• check how your results match (or not) the literature you introduced in the background section
• explain to the reader anything that could have affected your results
• show how each result affects what we already know about your topic of investigation.

This section brings all your conclusions together in light of the original question. You can think about it as a ‘bottom heavy’ summary of the report.

If you’re not sure what to include, try to summarise each section of the report into one sentence but expand on the results and conclusions you arrived at in the end. Remind the reader of the effects your results have on our understanding of the topic.

This is the section or sections where you can provide your reader with any further details or supplementing information that is too lengthy or tangential to be part of the main body of the report, but which could shed light on your findings or might satisfy the curiosity of a thorough reader.

Here you can include numerical evidence, interview transcripts, more extensive images, etc.