October 25, 2018

Marci Jordan

Bio-lab 1105-31

Lecture and Pre-lab; What goes on in each section and responses

Final Report

The scientific literature is written in a standard AIMRaD format of an Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion followed by Acknowledgements and Citations. The following information is a brief outline of each section in the order that it may be written.

1. Experimental Design: As you plan your experiment, read the literature and record your references and make notes of relevant background information.

The Introduction gives the background of your experiment and is often formatted in the way of an argument.  You are giving references to prior knowledge in order to build to your question and hypothesis. The introduction should begin by giving the reader all the information needed to understand the article and why it is important and novel. This description should be as brief as possible, while still giving all pertinent information.

2. Running the experiment: As you perform the experiment, keep detailed notes on your protocols. Record the materials that were used, the concentrations, time, and any other important information required in order to repeat the procedure.

The Materials and Methods section can be the easiest to write.  Write in a concise manner explaining everything that you did.  The materials and methods should include a very detailed account of all the procedures done and an explanation of why they were chosen. When finished, the reader should be able to replicate the experiments simply from the information given. No results or analyses should be included in this section.  Include the chemical information about your media and your treatment. Write in the past tense giving details of the organism, chemicals, media, volumes, concentrations, etc.

3. Analysis: Analyze your data by comparing the results of the Control samples and the Treatment samples. Common analyses include mean, median, mode, standard deviation, and student t-test.  Visualize your results using graphs and charts.

The Results sections should parallel your Methods. Each step in the procedure that has an outcome should be mentioned in the text of results. For your Lab Report, begin by analyzing your data and making your figures.  Remember for your report you may be including all the results for the class.  The final figures and tables should summarize the results in a cohesive manner. The narrative of the Results should point the reader to the Figures and describe the figures in words.

Statistical analysis of your data is essential and should be clearly explained and shown in all Tables and Figures. When comparing mean values among treatments, use of standard error (SE) is correct. The size of the SE is a function of the “n” so SE values are better than standard deviation (SD), because the SD does not depend on the “n”.

4. Discussion and Conclusion: Draw conclusions from your results. Return to the literature to look for similar experiments. Compare your results to what has been previously reported.  Propose future experiments and note any difficulties with your experimental design.

The Discussion should consider the significance of the results in regards to the problem that is at hand and should also consider the significance in comparison to other research. This section will offer a synthesis of the author(s)’ conclusions based on their experimental data and potentially what important questions should be addressed next.

5. Formatting: Check your paper for the correct scientific style and APA format, especially citations and references. Be sure not to plagiarize.

6. Abstract: After your paper is written, write a clear and concise Abstract.

The last thing to write is the Abstract. An abstract is a single paragraph composed of no more than 250 words. It briefly outlines the entire article, excluding details of the methods and should not contain reference citations.  It contains some background, the purpose, information about the general methods used, the most important results, and a conclusion or recommendation.

7. Title Page: The title page should include: the title of the article, your name and group members, the class and section, and semester. The title should provide as much relevant information as possible, but be concise.

Plagiarism is a form of Academic Dishonesty, and we take it very seriously. Note that any behavior that we feel constitutes Academic Dishonesty will be handled as recommended by the University.  Please see the course syllabus for information on Baylor’s Academic Dishonesty policies.

Examples of plagiarism:

1. Directly quoting text without attributing credit to the author
2. Paraphrasing text without attributing credit to the author
3. Copying a figure or table without attributing credit to the author
4. Using information in a figure or table (in your own revised version) without attributing credit to the author
5. General note regarding in-text citations: be sure the reader understands what the citation covers.  Also be sure everything you refer to in the body of the paper is listed in literature cited, and be sure there is nothing in literature cited which is not included in the body of the paper.
6. This assignment will use the Turnitin app which compares your writing with a very large database of writing samples, web pages, and journal articles.

Putting it Together

The Abstract

The instructions for writing an Abstract follows these general points:

• Some background information (Introduction)
• The purpose statement (Introduction)
• Some information (brief) about the Methods
• Overall and most important Results
• A statement about the Conclusions

For your report there is a 250 word limit.

Discussion and Conclusion

The Discussion should not be repetitive of the Introduction, but it should clearly connect with the issues and questions that you raised.    Here is a list of elements that are often found in the Discussion section.  Each sub section may be 1 or 2 paragraphs and may introduce new references.  The first 2 summarize the Introduction and Results.  The last 3 form an argument to explain the results and their importance.

1. The purpose of the study.
2. A summary of the findings in order of importance and whether they agree with the hypothesis and/or the literature.
3. Explanations for the findings with references to support your claims.
4. Implications and context in the broader field.

1. Recommendations or plans for future studies.

Citations and References

Journals vary in the style of citations they use.  For this report we will use the numerical citation system as seen in the following paragraph from the article  “EFFECT OF LIGHT ON TOXICITY OF NANOSILVER TO TETRAHYMENA PYRIFORMIS”.(On module 10) Check out the formats on Zotero and choose the one that matches this style.

The references are listed in numerical order according to the first time the reference is used and they are listed at the end of the report under a section titled REFERENCES.  Each Reference is listed in a standard format with required parts. The references should be up-to-date and essential in providing information required to understand the research.  For a research report, it is not necessary to write a review of the literature.  It is important to point the reader to the background information and relevant studies and of course- no plagiarism!

Besides numerical citations, many journals use (Author, Date) as seen below. These types of citations are also listed at the end of the article under REFERENCES, but this time in alphabetical order. Many text now also include an active link and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so the reader can link out to the references.

The overall point of citations and references is so the reader can know whose ideas are being described and where to go to find the evidence for the idea. It is important to be consistent in style. For this paper, use the APA format for citations and references. Alphabetize your references and number them.  Insert the number in the report whenever you refer to that reference. Use Zotero to make this a relatively easy task.

Purpose

The purpose of lab this week was to present our result figures with our lab group to the class. This gave us the chance to have incomplete or incorrect observations pointed out to us. The purpose was to also notice what other groups did differently and how it compared to ours.

Conclusion; Responses to results

In class we only went over results so I reflected a lot on that section. I have a lot to change! For cell counts a lot of group put their n value as 3 as each group used three drops however, you used everyone’s results so we must multiply 3 by the number of people. Next, each group had varying numbers for their p value while they should have the same. I now must go back and check that I used the correct values for each step to get my p values. With the p value I need to include that if it is less than 0.05 it is significant and rejects the null hypothesis. I also need to create a graph for vacuole formation and 15 minutes and combine it to the graph for 5 minutes.

Next Step

With all this new information I have a lot of checking and changes to make. I will use these two days before the rough draft is due to make it as perfect as possible. Therefore, I have fewer changes to make before the final draft is due. I will use the descriptive explanations of each section to make sure every aspect of my research paper is up to par.