Writing Lab Reports

The lab report is a straight forward summary of your experiment’s purpose, methods, and results. The typical lab report will have:

• An introduction, which states the problem, question, hypothesis, or objective. The introduction should state why this problem is worth investigating.
• A summary of your methods, told chronologically and precisely, so that other scientists might replicate them.
• A summary of your results, in which you lay out for your readers the data that your research has generated. Again, you will want to present these results clearly, thoroughly, and precisely.
• A discussion of your results, in which you explore their significance. Even if your results haven’t provided you with the information you sought, they remain important in that they might suggest other experiments to scientists interested in your subject.

Guide to writing Lab Reports

• Details to be included in a Lab Reports (Courtesy University of Toronto)
• Power Point from York University Libraries
  

Writing a Literature Review

A review of the literature looks at what has been published on a given problem; however, it is not simply a summary of what’s been written. It is instead a paper that tries to synthesize existing articles to form a coherent and thorough understanding of the matter at hand. It also evaluates these articles and the experiments upon which they are based, alerting the reader to potential weaknesses.

Most literature reviews have the following common characteristics:

• An overview of the subject, which includes a statement of the objectives
• A categorization and discussion of the works being reviewed, such as by methodologies, pro/con, etc.
• A detailed explanation of each work, with emphasis on similarities and differences from other works
• A conclusion which evaluates the works and suggests major implications
  

Other points to keep in mind while writing a literature review:

• A review is a comprehensive synthesis of results from a wide and complex set of studies
• A synthesis of findings rather than ideas.
• Goal of a review paper is to help readers make sense of all available information
• Do not use direct quotations in reviews.
  

Research reviews focus on primary sources

• Original scientific experimentation reported in scientific journals
• The quality of the review depends largely on the comprehensiveness of the literature search
  

You can use secondary sources–textbooks or review journals (Science, Scientific American, Discover) to:

• Get an overview of material
• Get keywords
• Help devise an outline
  

Check out these books for more help on Writing Literature Reviews:

LB 1047.3 M33 2009 The literature review : six steps to success

Writing literature reviews : a guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences

BF 76.7 R67 2006 Writing papers in psychology : a student guide to research reports, literature reviews, proposals, posters, and handouts

Q 180.55 M4 F56 2005 Conducting research literature reviews : from the Internet to paper

Additional materials on the subject of Report writing at YUL

Resources for Theses & Dissertations Writing:

Organizing your theses

The thesis is similar to an article for a scholarly publication. You and your thesis advisor will tailor the format of the thesis to your project. In general theses have the following components:

• Introduction and Background
• Literature Review
• Methods
• Findings
• Discussion
• Conclusions
  
• Bibliography
• Appendices
  

• Introduction and Background

This section introduces your research topic and contextualizes its broader significance. Here, you briefly describe your topic, why your research is important, and what you intend to do in your paper. You need to state your central findings in your thesis statement.

• Literature Review

The literature review provides information about the research already conducted in this area. It is meant to set the stage for your own research. Using previous research, you will describe the phenomenon you want to study and what previous research tells us about it. This section will build to a justification of the research you plan to do. It might help to work backwards and start with your research question and then structure this section of the paper so that your research seems like a natural and logical choice given what has and has not been done. The easiest way to do this is to arrange the literature review you have already done, not around individual articles, but around particular points or themes. Based on your review of the existing literature, what do you expect to find? These are your hypotheses.

• Methods

This section explains how you will do the research you propose. What data will you use? What does it contain? What will you be looking for – how will you identify the factors you need to study? Are you analyzing documents? What method will you use to analyze the data, and what models or themes will you analyze? Depending on your method, this section will take different forms. Theses in Arts and Humanities do not require a methodology section. This section should be very detailed, especially in your first draft. It’s better to include too much explanation of how you’ve conducted your original research, and then cut it later.

• Findings

In the findings section, you will present the analysis you have done of your data. You have a lot of freedom to structure this section, but is should be tightly structured around your research question, one or more propositions, or one or more hypotheses. In this section, you are exploring or examining what you said you planned to explore or examine in your introduction section, and you are using the methods you said you would use in your methods section.

• Discussion

The findings section brings the different elements of your paper together. In this section, you summarize your results from the findings section, relate these findings back to the literature you reviewed, describe the limitations of your study, and make a broader concluding statement about the importance of your findings.

• Conclusions

Answers the following questions: What contributions does your research make to the research on this particular subject? Based on your findings, what future research do you think would shed more light on your research questions?

• Bibliography

All of the works cited should be referenced in your bibliography. The bibliography must follow a standard format, such as Chicago Style, MLA, or APA or the format specified by your thesis advisor. YUL has a web site which highlights the different styles and it also has books on style guides. You should also to check out the Thesis and Dissertation Guidelines from the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York U and the York University Style Guide. York University Libraries subscribes to RefWorks which is a tool to collect, organize and cite your references. RefWorks workshops at YUL

• Appendices

You should include a copy of any survey or questionnaire you distributed in an appendix. An appendix might also include tables of raw data analysis, which you did not include in the text of your thesis.

Guide to Thesis writing

• How to Write a Dissertation (courtesy Purdue University)
• Theses Writing Tips (courtesy University of Toronto)
• How to Write a Thesis (courtesy Columbia University)
• Additional materials on the subject of thesis and dissertation writing at YUL