Lab Report – The Kinetics of Acid Phosphate(lab-based)

WRITING Lab REPORTS (2000-4000 words)

Writing about practical work is necessary skill for your profession and one of the major forms of assessment of your degree programme. Laboratory portfolio can vary depending on experimental approach but they all have the same basic structure. Writing practical reports encourages you to think more deeply about your experiments and to practice and test the skills necessary for writing up of future research work. Details how to write the report are shown below.

Special features of a report are

Abstract (5 marks): Brief summary of the report – should include the background of why this research is important; methods used; major result and conclusion – look at any published research article for an example        (~ 250 words) 

Introduction (20 marks): Should provide fully referenced background information that is focused on the topic of the lab class and an outline of the aims of the experiment(s). This should not be an extensive literature review.(~750 words or 2 Pages)

Materials & Methods (5 marks): Methods should be written in sentences (no bullet points) in the past-tense and in the third person, i.e. do not use ‘I’ or ‘we’. This should NOT be a reproduction of lab protocols. (The number of words will depend on experiments done)                                                                                                                                                     

Results (30 marks): Each result description should start with the purpose of the experiment, description of the results (for example “Addition of hormone resulted in five-fold increase of GILZ gene expression” (Figure 1, compare lane 2 to lane 1)). Result description should finish with a conclusion for each experiment and should be displayed in graphs- tables or figures that are fully labeled with titles and figure legends. The data should be summarised using text that refers to the corresponding figure or table numbers. In assessing the piece of work, great attention will be paid to the presentation, description and analysis of data. (The number of words will depend on experiments done)

Discussion(25 marks):Should consider the outcome of the experiment (did it work? Were the results as expected? Can you identify any technical difficulties?)  It should also consider your results in comparison with the published literature.  Highlight the significance/ importance of your results.  Make a conclusion.  (~1000 words)

References and Presentation (15 marks): The required number of references will depend on each lab practical but generally 10 – 20 references will suffice. More will be required for the project reports. We use the Harvard format (see Appendix 2).  (10 – 20 references)