Biology (Neuroscience)

BIOL145-05 F11

Bio310

How to write a manuscript

“Verbal communication is temporal and easily forgotten, but written reports exist for long periods and yield long-term benefits for the author and others.

Scientific research is a group activity. Individual scientists perform experiments to test hypotheses about biological phenomena. After experiments are completed and duplicated, researchers attempt to persuade others to accept or reject their hypotheses by presenting the data and their interpretations. The lab report or the scientific manuscript is the vehicle of persuasion; when it is published, it is available to other scientists for review. If the results stand up to criticism, they become part of the accepted body of scientific knowledge unless later disproved.

In some cases, a report may not be persuasive in nature but instead is an archival record for future generations. For example, data on the distribution and frequency of rabid skunks in a certain year may be of use to future epidemiologists in deciding whether the incidence of rabies is increasing. Regardless of whether a report is persuasive or archival, the following guidelines apply.” Warren D. Dolphin, ISU

If you ever searched for scientific papers before, you probably noticed that many papers, particularly the primary sources, are written in a similar format. The papers are usually organized in five sections:

Introduction

Material & Methods

Results

Discussion

Literature Cited

When you write up your IHC lab report, you will follow this general format, so be sure to refer to a primary literature manuscript in the scientific literature as a guide.

General instructions

Proper format: Type report; double-space, font size 12, one inch margins on left, right, top, and bottom; number the pages.

The different sections, i.e. Material & Methods, Results, and Literature cited or References (if you cite something), must be titled as such (i.e. Material & Methods etc.).

No quotes from papers you have read are allowed. All of the text must be written in your own words.

Citing the scientific literature in the text of your report

I am not requiring you to use background literature for this assignments. But if you choose to use citations, be sure to cite them properly. Do not use web sites as sources of information. If you refer to information from a paper or book in the text of your report, cite the work by including the name(s) of the author and the date of publication. The citations should be included between a set of parentheses at the end of the first sentence in which the work is mentioned. For example, if the paper has a single author, use Stern (1992) or (Stern 1992);

for two authors, use Stern and Canning (1990) or (Stern and Canning 1990);

for more than 2 authors: Stern et al. (1990) or (Stern et al. 1990).

List the whole reference (Authors, Title, Journal, Year of Publication) at the end of the report.

TITLE:

Please DO include a title. Do not title it something like “Bio390: IHC Project.” Your title must reflect what your study was about.

The title should be less than ten words and should reflect the factual content of the paper. Scientific titles are not designed to catch the reader's fancy. A good title is straightforward and uses keywords that researchers in a particular field will recognize.

Introduction:

(Not included in this assignment but useful as guidelines for the oral presentation)

The Introduction contains background information and a description of the study’s purpose. You should explain the research problem and what other people have done previously on this subject. You should describe why your work is important and how it seeks to expand knowledge. Your introduction should not start with a statement of your hypothesis. It should not begin with “The goal was” or “The hypothesis was.” Instead, you should lead the reader to your hypothesis by providing a general background or reasoning for the problem you have studied. You will return to these ideas in the discussion. An explicit statement of the objective, goal, or hypothesis should appear toward the end of the section. The introduction will probably be one to several paragraphs long.

A good introduction will answer several questions, including the following:

Why was this study performed?

What knowledge already exists about this subject?

What is the specific purpose of the study?

MATERIAL & METHODS:

This section describes how the study was performed. You should describe your experimental details and experimental design. Describe your laboratory methods clearly so that another person would be able to replicate your work from your description. You want to include enough details for someone to repeat your experiment but do not include trivial details.

This section should be written in paragraph form. Use the past tense; passive voice is acceptable for the Methods section. Avoid repetition. Omit words like then, now, next etc., because they’ll make it sound like a list of steps to be followed in order. Do not use lists to describe materials used or the steps you took to complete the experiment.

Generally, this section attempts to answer the following questions:

What materials were used? How were they used? Where and when was the work done? (This question is most important in field studies.)

RESULTS:

In this section, you will describe the results of your experiment by describing the data you collected. You will save your interpretation of your experiments for the Discussion section.

You can think of the results section as a translation of unprocessed data from the notebook to a succinct and easily understood form. Your data should be analyzed, sorted and synthesized before they are presented. You should describe the results of your experiments in paragraph form and illustrate the results with graphs, tables, and/or figures. Make sure to label every drawing, graph, or table as Figure 1, 2, 3 etc. and refer to every labeled graph, table, and/or figure in your text.

This section of your manuscript should concentrate on general trends and differences and not on trivial details. Many authors organize and write the results section before the rest of the report.

Discussion:

(Not included in this assignment but useful as guidelines for the oral presentation)

Here is a chance to evaluate your hypothesis and to explain what your results mean. Did your results support the hypothesis or not, or are the results inconclusive? Be careful here; you are not “proving” or “disproving” anything, nor is your hypothesis “right” or “wrong” based on this one experiment. How does your experiment fit into the general background of information on this problem as described in the introduction? Speculation is appropriate, if it is so identified. Suggestions for the improvement of techniques or experimental design may also be included here. What further experiments would you like to do and why? Were there problems with the protocol? What would you change? The best Discussion sections are thoughtful and include original ideas.

In writing this section, you should explain the logic that allows you to accept or reject your original hypotheses. You should also be able to suggest future experiments that might clarify areas of doubt in your results. Be sure to cite any references to other manuscripts in the proper format.

Your grade does not depend upon whether or not your hypothesis was supported but reflects instead how well you discussed the data with reference to your hypothesis. Your discussion will be brief (about a page long.) It is not meant to be a long description of the scientific literature.

LITERATURE CITED:

This is a list of any source you cited in your manuscript, formatted exactly as you did for the library lab. Cited literature is expected! When you cite more than one source, list them in alphabetical order by the last name of the first author of the manuscript. If a manuscript has more than one author, do not rearrange the order of the authors’ names.

Every source included in your Literature Cited section must have been cited somewhere in your report. Conversely, every source cited in the text must be included in the Literature Cited section.

EXAMPLES OF CITATIONS:

Journal Articles:

Alcock, J. and Gwynne, D.T. 1987. Courtship feeding and mate choice in thynnine wasps. Aust. J. Zool. 35: 451-458.

Nilsson, L.A. 1992. Orchid pollination biology. Trends Ecol. Evol. 7: 255-259.

Schiestl, F.P., Ayasse, M., Paulus, H.F., Lofsdedt, C., Hanson, B.S., Ibarra, F., and Franke, F. 1999. Orchid pollination by sexual swindle. Nature. 399: 421-422.

Encyclopedia of Life Sciences:

Anderson, O.R. 2001. Protozoan ecology.  In: eLS.  John Wiley & Sons.

Book:

Wickler, W. 1968. Mimicry in plants and animals. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Article/Chapter in Edited Volume:

Stowe, M.K. 1988. Chemical mimicry. In Chemical mediation of coevolution (ed. K.C. Spencer), pp. 513-587. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

4. Some journals are not available online at UHart; however, we are lucky that the library is very well connected. Through ILLiad, an electronic system that you can use to request an item through Interlibrary Loan, we are able to access unlimited resources. The name ILLiad can be thought of as an acronym for InterLibrary Loan internet accessible database. The librarians can help you to get an Interlibrary Loan account and show you how to request items using ILLiad.

FIGURE LEGENDS:

Figures are sometimes considered to be the most important part of a scientific paper. They contain and relay all the evidence reported in the research. Since that is the case, all figures and tables must be self-standing, which means that the reader should be able to understand the figure just by reading the legend.

What to discuss when writing an effective figure legend:

Every figure legend should be written to answer the What-Why-What questions.

What is it? Why did you do it? What were the results?

Be sure to include a descriptive title of all your graphs, tables, and figures and a figure legend that allows the reader to understand what is presented in the figure or table. Don’t forget to include units and label the x and y-axes in all plots.

General Comments on Style

1. All scientific names (genus and species) must be italicized. (Underlining indicates italics in a typed paper.)

2. Use the metric system of measurements. Abbreviations of units are used without a following period.

3. Be aware that the word data is plural while datum is singular. This affects the choice of a correct verb. The word species is used both as a singular and as a plural.

4. Numbers should be written as numerals when they are greater than ten or when they are associated with measurements; for example, 6 mm or 2 g but two explanations of six factors. When one list includes numbers over and under ten, all numbers in the list may be expressed as numerals; for example, 17 sunfish, 13 bass, and 2 trout. Never start a sentence with numerals. Spell all numbers beginning sentences.

5. Be sure to divide paragraphs correctly and to use starting and ending sentences that indicate the purpose of the paragraph. A report or a section of a report should not be one long paragraph.

6. Every sentence must have a subject and a verb.

7. Avoid using the first person, I or we, in writing. Keep your writing impersonal, in the third person. Instead of saying, "We weighed the frogs and put them in a glass jar," write, "The frogs were weighed and put in a glass jar."

8. Avoid the use of slang and the overuse of contractions.

9. Be consistent in the use of tense throughout a paragraph--do not switch between past and present. It is best to use past tense. Present tense is expected in the Discussion section.

And last but certainly not least…..

Proof-read your report (reading it aloud works well) and use a spell-checker. Pay attention to little details like proper punctuation.

Check that your writing is clear, concise and grammatically correct, and that your thoughts are well organized,

Be certain there is no plagiarism: all phrasing, wording, etc. is your own and all information obtained from other sources (except general knowledge) is cited. I take plagiarism very seriously; if you have any questions about it, ask me!

Questions to consider for discussion in laboratory or in your written report

1. What pushed you to test your hypothesis? What observation did you or other make before?

2. Do the results support your hypothesis?  If so, does this mean your hypothesis is correct? If not, might errors in the experimental procedure have affected the results? 

3. Did you expect the number of experimental measures to be precisely the same in both conditions?  Suggest reasons why these values might differ.

4. On the basis of the data obtained how should the organism/behavior/effect be classified? Does your analysis match that usually given in textbooks?  (Obs! It depends on the variables that you are testing)

5. Did you expect the experimental group to behave similarly or differently from the control group? Suggest reasons why these values might be different.

6. If a definite relationship between conditions was observed, suggest some reasons for this relationship. 

7. In what way would you revise the experiment if you wished to test a similar hypothesis again? Would you expect experimental results of such an experiment to be quite similar or very different?   

8. Would the experiment have been better if we had used more extreme conditions? 

9. Other than an owner of planarian, who might find use for what was learned about planarian and the conditions tested?

Use this checklist to see that your report meets the guidelines

General

1. Type your report 2. Spellcheck your report

3. Write the report using the past tense. Use the present tense for the Discussion section

4. Have a title page that includes the title, your name and the name of your partner 5. Number each page after the title page 6. Use headings (Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, References Cited)

Title 7. Identify the organism, the response measured, and the environmental variable

Introduction 8. Include the hypothesis, the basis for the hypothesis, and the prediction used to test the hypothesis

9. Include at least 2 pieces of information that you learned from reference sources

Materials and Methods 10. Tell what was used at the time and tell how the item was used. Don't make a separate list.

Results 11. Tell in words and paragraphs what was observed and what did result

12. Place tables and figures (graphs) in the Results section

13. Give each table and each figure (graph) a number and a title. Refer to each by number in the text of the Results section. Write a figure legend.

Discussion

14. Evaluate the hypothesis by telling if the results support or fail to support the prediction used to test the hypothesis.

15. Address biological reasons to explain why what resulted did result, perhaps including information used to answer the questions in the lab manual. 16. State a conclusion or the major piece(s) of information learned in the study in a manner that has meaning if read separate from the rest of the report.

References Cited

17. Include at least 4 citations, 2 in the Introduction and 2 in the Discussion section. Cite the references used to learn information related to the investigation.

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