How To Write A Lab Report - Format, Tips and Examples.
What is an IMRaD report? “IMRaD” format refers to a paper that is structured by four main sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This format is often used for lab reports as well as for reporting any planned, systematic research in the social sciences, natural sciences, or engineering and computer sciences.
This way is not necessary for this type of paper, since this is lab report for the identification of an unknown bacterium and the methods are explained in detail in the lab manual. If there is a procedure that the instructor added or made changes to, or the student used another procedure not in the course lab manual, then it should be written out and referenced.
In this section of the lab report you are ONLY stating your materials and methods. Do not explain results or discuss them here. The methods section can be written as separate paragraphs for each different experimental set up you had to perform or can be split off into subsections each with its own subtitle.
The length one opts to use largely depends on the size and scope of the lab report. The trick scholars can use to find the appropriate length of the abstract for a lab report is to make it 10% of the complete report. Therefore, it is safe to say students can adapt any of the above two formats.
Most probably, you will be asked to write your scientific method lab report in APA. If you have to write an APA lab report, feel free to download the free APA manuals and you will see how APA methods section, APA results section, APA discussion section or any other part of your report should look like.
The style of writing which you use to convey technical information is, in general, different from that used for other purposes. There are a number of excellent textbooks on the subject such as references, and, which cover this topic. Make sure that you refer to this guidance whenever you write laboratory reports.
The Methods section of a research article is like a roadmap leading to the core of the research, guiding the readers through the actual journey the authors took to reach their destination. In the manuscript, this section contains the essential details for other scientists to replicate the experiments of the study and help the common readers to understand the study better.