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Home Up Ethical Behavior Lab Report Overview General Guidelines Researching the topic Report Format Grading Criteria Specifics Add. Resources MED-PC Output Cumulative Record

Format of a Scientific Report

An important goal of this course is to familiarize you with the proper format for writing research articles. Therefore, your report must conform to the required format. The following is a guideline to assist you. Of course, the best way to become familiar with this format of writing would be to read several journal articles.

 

First Page – cover – no page number:

 

TITLE

your name

Boston University

 

And then bottom right:

Your name

Date

E-mail address

 

The title of your paper should be meaningful and informative as to the content of the paper, using as few words as possible.

 

Second Page:

ABSTRACT

 

An abstract is a brief summary (200 words maximum) of the paper. It should be concise and precise and must cover four important points:

What you did.
How you did it (procedure).
What the results were (findings).
The interpretation of that result.

The abstract is usually written last. For examples of abstracts, refer to any journal article in the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

 

 

Third Page:

This is where you begin your introduction. Do not however type the word "introduction".

Your introduction should be approximately 1 ½ to 2 pages in length and should include the following:
A statement of the issues being investigated.
A selected summary of previous work on this topic.  Suggested readings appear in the Specifics for Lab Reports section. Also refer to Additional Resources. Use journal articles and original source material only. Do not use textbooks for your introduction.
The purpose of your experiment.
The significance of your predicted results.

 

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METHOD

Information in the method section should be sufficiently comprehensive to allow any reader to be able to replicate your study by using the information contained in this section.

 

Subjects

Information about the subjects should include the following:

Species, sex, age, where they were obtained.
Housing, feeding, weight.

 

Apparatus

Describe all the apparatus and control equipment concisely. A diagram of the operant chamber should be included, giving relevant dimensions.

 

Procedure

This is a precise account of what you did and the order in which you did it. It is important to describe what was done (in the past tense) and not what should have been done.

 

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RESULTS

This section is purely factual. No conclusions or inferences should be made in this section. It should provide an organized and comprehensive description of the effects of the independent variables. It should contain relevant statistics – means, standard deviations, ANOVA (analysis of variance) and t-tests. Tables and figures should be used to communicate information that would otherwise take hundreds of words.

It is imperative that all figures and tables are correctly labeled and captioned. All figures are entitled "figure" never "graph" or "diagram". They are numbered consecutively. Tables and figures are specified with Arabic (never Roman) numerals e.g. Table 2 or Figure 7.

The text should inform the reader when to look at the figures and tables. For example, you might say, "As shown in Figure 1."

There are two correct ways of presenting figures and tables:

  1. In the body of your report. If you choose to present your figures in the body of the report then the caption should be directly under the figure. The caption should explain clearly, what the figure is showing in such a way that it is not necessary for the reader to refer to the text.
  2. At the end of the report. If you select this option then each figure and table should be on a separate sheet, clearly labeled. All captions should then be typed on one sheet. It will also be necessary in the body of the text to notify the reader when to refer to a figure or table. This is done as follows:

__________________________________________________________________________________

 Insert Figure 1 about here

__________________________________________________________________________________

For some of the experiments you will be given a computer generated cumulative record of your subject’s data. The cumulative record is considered a figure. The cumulative curve tells a story about the rats bar pressing behavior. In order to get information from the curve you must be able to read it. The curve is a cumulative curve because you add any one response to the total number which have preceded it. It is a rate curve because it shows the number of responses which occur in any given time unit (usually minutes). There are only three characteristics that a cumulative response can display.

  1. Linearity: In this case, the number of responses per unit time is the same in each successive time unit.
  2. Positive acceleration. When a cumulative curve is positively accelerated the number of responses per unit of time increases for each successive time unit.
  3. Negative acceleration. During a period of negative acceleration, the curve is characterized by a decreasing number of responses in each succeeding time unit.

 

Note: Click here for the example of a cumulative record and the description thereof.

 

DISCUSSION

In this section, you analyze your results. You are helping the reader understand what conclusions can be drawn from your data. Discuss how your results relate to the field, particularly with regard to the theories that you selected for your introduction.

Also, discuss possible sources of error, effects of apparatus and experimental failures or weakness with regard to experimental design.

Where appropriate make suggestions for further studies.

The last paragraph should provide a succinct statement of the main message.

 

New Page:

REFERENCES

This is a list of books and articles cited in your report.

 

Use APA format (the official format of the American Psychological Society) – note that this format differs from that in the published journal articles.

An example of APA format is:

Amsel, A., Mackinnnon, J. R., Rashotte, M. E., & Surridge, C. T. (1964). Partial reinforcement (acquisition) effects within subjects. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 7(2), 135-138.

Citations in the reference section are alphabetized by last name of author. When a name appears more than once arrange the articles chronologically.

 

 

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APPENDIX

Attach original data sheets. Do not recopy them no matter how messy they may be for this merely opens the door to an additional source of error.