Thursday, July 3, 2008

Portfolio: Introduction to Writing in Biology

Carrying out experiments is only half of the work that scientists have to accomplish. Almost always, they have to communicate their findings to colleagues, peers, funding agencies, and the scientific community in general. Publishing articles in professional journals is the method in which scientists communicate with each other. These articles range from short communications of one or two pages to full-length manuscripts that can span many pages of a printed journal.

A quick survey of a scientific journal reveals that scientists use a specific style of writing. Some adjectives that are commonly used to describe the style of scientific writing are: pithy, lean, to-the-point, concise, exact. Additionally, every field tends to have its own individual style, language, and way of doing things.

The practice of scientific writing starts early on in the sciences. Graduate studies in the life sciences culminate with a very comprehensive written document—a thesis if you are a Master’s student or a dissertation if you are a PhD student. Here at WPI, you will be required to write up your MQP very similar to a Master’s thesis. In preparation for this, lab report writing is used in the biology labs to initiate students into the realm of scientific writing.

Lab reports have some of the components that are found in professional journal articles and so they are a good place to start practicing how to communicate with other scientists. Writing in biology can be different than any other type of writing you have done previously. The following can be used as a guide to writing lab reports in the introductory biology labs.

Lab Report Components

A good lab report should read like a story—the story of your experiment! You can think about it in the sense that you are answering the following questions to piece the story together:

Why did you do the experiment?

A good lab report always starts with an introduction. Through the introduction, you want to put the reader on the map and tell them why you are about to do the experiment. You should tell the reader about objectives of the experiment.

The introduction should contain relevant background to the experiments from outside sources. You need to bring the reader up to speed by giving s/he enough background so that s/he can understand why you are doing the experiment. For some labs, this may be background on a technique that includes why and how it is used. But, for other labs in which you are really investigating a new question it needs to include what previous work has been done to address the question you are investigating.

Either way, any time an outside source is used to gather information for your introduction it must be properly cited. The end of your report should contain a list of all the references you used to construct the background information. Within the text, where you used the source, you should make a citation that points the reader to the appropriate source in your reference section.

There are many citation and reference styles and examples of these can be found in any technical writing manual. There are several reference styles that are appropriate for the lab report. The Council of Science Editors (CSE) citation style is a good choice because it widely used and accepted in the biological sciences. The CSE style has a both a numerical citation system and an author/date citation system. Either of these systems is appropriate for the lab report as long as you remain consistent. Later, when you publish in professional journals, there will be explicit instructions to the style to use so it is not so important to learn one particular style as opposed to another. The Chicago Manual of Style or the American Psychological Association (APA) methods are also acceptable.


How did you do it?

The materials and methods should be a concise how to for the reader. If someone wanted to repeat your experiments, s/he should be able to glean everything they need to know from your materials and methods. This is the full disclosure of the science world! Part of the unspoken agreement among scientists is that there is nothing to hide. You are putting your experiments out there so that others can learn from them and even repeat them. So, your materials and methods should be detailed enough for that to be possible.

What happened?

The results section is where you will present your data and findings. But, it is also still a crucial part of the storytelling and should therefore include text. The results section is not just a place to plop down your tables and charts! You need to continue to bring the reader along by introducing each piece of data in the text and also by properly titling and captioning each figure or table that is included. If you do not refer to it in the results text, then it should not be in the report!

Results text writing is sometimes the hardest part of the lab report for students. It is hard to separate the presentation of the data (results) from the analysis of the data (discussion). One way of thinking about it is that the results is where the data is described. A figure is introduced and then the major highlights of that figure are talked about. You want to draw the reader’s eye to important components of the data by actually pointing it out to them and telling them to go look there. The following is an example of two figures that are described and referred to with appropriate text:


Order is important! You are the storyteller so make sure you lay out the data in a way that helps you tell the story. Sometimes we do things in the laboratory out of sequence to save time. This does not mean that you have to present your data precisely in the order you collected it. You should look at all of your data and then put it in an order that makes sense in relation to the objectives of the experiment and what you were trying to accomplish.

There is no bad data! All data belongs in the story. Even when you do not get the result you expected. If an experiment failed, say so. Remember, full disclosure in science!

What do you think it all means?

Once you have presented all of your data, now it is time to make sense of it all. In the discussion, you should give your thoughts on what your data means. It should not be a repeat description of the data from the results text but instead a passage where you wrap up the story. Interpretations of the data should be made. Implications of the data should be discussed as well as links to other accepted findings or theories. The following is an example of discussion text for the results described above:

The discussion is also a place to pose the next set of questions. Are there any holes in your experiment that you see now that it is done? Do your data suggest any further experiments that need to be done? Rarely does one set of experiments lead to a final piece of work. Rather, it provides the launching point for the next set of experiments and the next paper!

Writing Resources

It is a good idea to keep a technical writing manual at your elbow while you are writing. The following may be a useful resource for writing your lab reports:

Successful Lab Reports, A Manual for Science Students by Christopher S. Lobban & Maria Schefter (ISBN 0-521-40741-9)

You can obtain a copy of this from the WPI bookstore or Amazon.com. Also, there are copies available in the file folders outside the biology computer lab on the 2nd floor of Salisbury. Don’t forget, your instructors and TAs are excellent resources for information on scientific writing and WPI has a writing center located on the 2nd Floor of the Project Center.

Good Luck!

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