Writing a Manuscript-Style Lab Report

Learning how to present your results is an important skill to develop. Throughout this course, you will be asked to prepare a number of Manuscript-style Lab Reports. There are a variety of guidelines on how to do this, including the Publication Style of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2009). The APA guide is quiet comprehensive and is a great resource for writing style in general. Few neuroscience journals are published by the APA, so we regularly recommend that our students use the style that the Society for Neuroscience uses for the Journal of Neuroscience (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/information-authors#preparing_a_manuscript). Other guides exist as well, such as The Manual of Scientific Style: A Guide for Authors, Editors, and Researchers by Rabinowitz and Vogel (2009); Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, And Publishers by the Council of Science Editors (2006) and Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers by the Council of Biology Editors (1994). The Elements of Style by Strunk and White (2008) is a valuable resource for all writing; scientific or otherwise. The basic format of a research report includes the following sections, based on the style of the Journal of Neuroscience: Title Page, Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, References. Additionally, your report may include tables and/or figures. Following the references you would included a Table Legend, the Tables, a Figure Legend, and finally the Figures.

Title Page:

Your Title Page should include the following:

The title of your report. This should be informative, as it will be the first thing that people search for information will see, and based on your title they will decide if your paper is relevant enough to their search to go on an read your abstract.
Your personal information (Name and student number)
Number of tables and figures
Number of pages
Number of words in the Abstract
Number of words in the Introduction
Number of words in the Discussion
Six keywords

Abstract:

Your abstract is a brief summary of the overall manuscript, and is usually limited to 250 words. You want to briefly and clearly set up the topic area and question examined, the goal of the study, the methods, the results and major conclusions of the study. Use full sentences. Avoid using references and subheadings. When you do publish a paper, this is the one thing that people will read to decide if they want to invest the time to read the rest of your paper. Think of it like reading the summary on the back of a novel when trying to decide if you want to spend money on it (except of course that your abstract should give away the ending).

Introduction:

The introduction has two goals: Introduce the topic area, and build a rational for the study. Some journals insist upon strict limits for an introduction. The Journal of Neuroscience has a limit of 500 words (only double the abstract!), while some others allow 1000 words. Check with your instructor on their expectations. Often student papers have a third goal, that is to demonstrate an understanding of the topic area literature. This may require a substantially longer introduction. This can make it very challenging to write an effective introduction, as reviewing the literature and building a case for your study can be hard to combine. The following advice may be useful: Start your introduction with a background paragraph that introduces the area (e.g., learning, feeding, sex). In this paragraph you should move very quickly to research area, so that by the end of this first paragraph, the reader has an idea of where the introduction is headed (e.g., the role of pyramidal cells in the hippocampus for spatial learning). The literature you review in the rest of the introduction should relate back to this first paragraph (e.g., you’d likely want to review the different types of learning, focus particularly on spatial learning; the role of the hippocampus in learning and the cellular anatomy of the hippocampus). For effective writing, try to focus each paragraph on a concept, rather than a study. If you write each paragraph about a study, the document will start to seem like an annotated bibliography, and will fail to build a rational for your study. Focus on the concept, and cite a number of studies that address that concept. Try to organize your paragraphs in a logical fashion so each concept leads logically to the next paragraph. When discussing a paper, particularly a scientific paper, the findings and their meaning that are important. The methods need not be discussed unless you feel that there was a problem with the study and therefore you don’t agree with their findings. In this case, just highlight the flaw, and give your point of view. Critiquing the literature is encouraged. Don’t believe everything you read. Similarly, you might find in your literature review that two studies found different results, and the reason could be a difference in methodology. In this case it might be worthwhile discussing the different methods, and then make a ruling of which study/result, in your opinion, should be focused on. Your introduction should end with a clear statement of your hypothesis. If you have done an effective job building a rational, this hypothesis should be easy for the reader to guess, as everything up to now should have been leading to this question.

Materials and Method:

The materials and methods section can contain a number of subheadings, that might include: Animals, Apparatus, Drugs, Procedures, Analysis, etc … Sufficient detail should be given so that someone could replicate your study based on reading only your materials and methods section. Often scientists who use the same technique repeatedly will shorten their Materials and Methods section by saying “… was done as has been previously reported (Smith and Jones, 2010)”. While this is acceptable in scientific publishing, it is not acceptable for student papers, where your instructors want to see if you understand what you actually did in the laboratory exercise.

Results:

The results section should present your findings. Avoid interpretation of the data. Data need only be presented once, in the text, a table or a figure. You will need to decide while of the three is most effective for your data. If you put the data into a table or a figure, refer to the table of figure here in the results section. Report statistical test here. Include the statistic, the degrees of freedom and the probability that the finding was found by chance alone. Some excellent advice for presenting your statistics has been prepared by the editors of the European Journal of Neuroscience (Sarter and Fritschy, 2008). They recommend keeping statistical statements about main effects and interactions inside brackets to maintain their readability. A good example would be: “The glutamate antagonist impaired learning in all mice (main effect of drug; F(1,12)=4.65, p=0.01), although it had a more pronounced effect on the knockout mice (significant drug x genotype interaction; F(3,12)=6.42, p=0.001). Overall, the knockout mice had poorer performance than did the wildtype mice (main effect of genotype; F(1,12)=3.11, p=0.03)”.

Discussion:

The discussion section should start with a clear statement about your major findings. Explain what these findings mean for your hypothesis, and for knowledge in the field. What do we know now that we didn’t before you undertook your study? Relate your findings back to the literature. Are your findings consistent with general understanding of the field, or do they change the way we think about the question? Do they resolve any discrepancies in the field? If they are inconsistent with other findings, what are the possible sources of this inconsistency? Are there any unresolved questions or new questions as a result of your findings? Discuss future directions that the research may take. End the discussion with an overall summary that highlights the significance of your work. Despite these many issues to address, the discussion should be concise. Some journals have word limits on discussions too; for instance the Journal of Neuroscience limits you to 1500 words.

References:

There are a variety of citation styles, and generally these are specified by the journal. Use of a citation manager such as Endnotes (http://www.endnote.com/) or Refworks (http://www.refworks.com/) may simplify building your reference list and track citations throughout your paper, applying the proper style throughout. These software packages have an appreciable learning curve, and should be avoided if the first time you go to use it is the night before you have to hand in your paper. Many university libraries offer course or tutorials in how to use these software packages, and may even have site licenses which make the software available to students for free or at a significant discount. If you will be doing a lot of scientific writing, you should look into such software and the offered courses.

A generic citation style would be to cite the references in the text as follows:

For one or two authors, give the last names and year in chronological order
- (Smith, 1990; Jones and Johnson, 2010)
- Smith (1990) and Jones and Johnson (2010)
For three or more authors, give just the last name of the first author
- (Smith et al., 2009)
- Smith et al. (2009)

For your reference section, list the articles in alphabetical order by the first author’s last name. If you have a number of papers by the same first author, list them in chronological order. If there are more than 20 authors, just list the first author, followed by et al. The structure should be:

Authors’ last name then their initials
Publication year in brackets.
Title of article
Journal title, abbreviated. The proper abbreviations can be found here: http://library.caltech.edu/reference/abbreviations/
Journal volume
First page number - last page number
For books, list the publication place and publisher at the end of the entry

Advice for effective referencing:

Do not use “as cited in”. You’ll see this in some papers, but it reflects poorly on you. Go to the original reference. If you can’t get the original paper (ancient paper, not available at your university, it is written in a language you can’t read) then it is acceptable, but you should really avoid it at all costs.
Don’t cite course textbooks. Put in the effort to find the original source.
It is better to cite the paper that discovered the phenomenon you’re talking about, rather than someone who merely talked about the previously discovered phenomenon in their paper. While it is important to back up your statement with references (in which case both approaches work) it is equally important to give credit where credit is due (in which case only the former style is acceptable).
Publication styles give you instructions on a variety of ways to cite and quote sources. However, just because there is a correct way to quote a paper, doesn’t mean that quoting a paper is correct. In most of neuroscience writing you should rarely, if ever, quote (did you find any quotations in the papers you’ve read in preparing for your paper?). In all my published work, I have only quoted a paper once, and it was because I disagreed with what the authors stated in their paper. A quote lifted out of a paper and integrated into your work may or may not make sense out of context. It makes your paper hard to read and makes it look unsophisticated in most cases. Approach your paper with the plan of not quoting anything. This is different from a paper in a literature class, where if you were trying to analyze or interpret a piece of literature, you’d need to quote.
When citing work, consider using the style “Schizophrenia is a devastating disease (Smith, 2001; Jones, 2002)” rather than “Smith (2001) claimed that schizophrenia is a devastating disease, a thought echoed by Jones (2002)”. By putting the authors’ names inside the brackets, you put the emphasis on the concept. When the authors’ names are outside the bracket, it puts the emphasis on the authors. There are times when you might want to emphasize an author (e.g., a leader in the field who’s contribution changed the way we think about something; a scientist whose paper is directly relevant and applicable to your central hypothesis), but this is not necessary, and you should approach your paper with the plan of having the authors’ names inside the brackets. By doing this, it will help you keep your writing about the concepts, rather than having your paper sink to simply being a summary of a bunch of papers.

Table and Figure Captions:

Following your reference list should be a page that contains all the captions for your tables listed in numerical order. All your tables should be cited in the text in order of appearance. Following the table caption page should be all your tables, each on a separate page. Following the tables should be a Figure caption page that contains all the captions for your figures listed in numerical order. All your figures should be cited in the text in order of appearance. Following the figure caption page should be all of your figures, each on a separate page. Don’t feel compelled to include figures and tables just because there is a place for them in the style. Use them if you need them, and leave them out if you don’t need them.

Figures

Making a good figure is a bit of an art. If someone has a copy of your paper on their desk and they are interested in what you found, they may first (and in some cases only) look at your figures without reading a thing! Making your figures easy to understand and self explanatory is essential to getting your central message across. Here are some generic pieces of advice:

Always display the control group on the left and the treatment to the right. We read from left to right, so this way the reader will see the typical situation first, and then see how this is altered by your treatment
Don’t make the reader refer to the figure caption to interpret your figure if at all possible, as many people won’t even read these. E.g., for line graphs or scatter plots, include a figure legend within the plot so that the reader knows what the symbols mean. Assume your reader is incredibly lazy, and make it as easy as possible for them to understand what you are trying to show.