Lab Report Guidelines

A few words about lab reports...

You should write your report pretending that it is for your boss or a preparation for a scientific paper, and not a ‘homework’ assignment.  For the first few labs, the data sets are small and artificial, so the reports here can be pretty short - some of these guidelines might not really apply. However, very soon you will be doing more substantial analyses on large, real data sets, so these little ones are good for practicing.

Your report should contain (at least):

• your Name and a Date on it
• the Scientific Purpose of the analysis should be stated
• a brief Description of the data should be given
• the Analyses should be described, make sure to clearly state any assumptions you
  make in the analyses
• the Results should be given
• there should be some Interpretations and Conclusions

The report should not contain the R commands you used (unless I specifically ask for it, and in that case it should be given in an appendix at the end of the report), and should also not contain every bit of output you produced but rather a summary of the relevant bits.

For the exam, you will be required to analyze data and write up your findings in a report. I can guarantee that it will be impossible to get a 6 on the exam if you cannot write a report of sufficiently high quality – no matter how many plots you include or how much data you analyze. Communicating your findings is part of the job of a scientist, and that is what you all are!

Your report can be in English or in French, and should be written in a clear, simple to understand manner. You are not required to turn in a report each week, however I would strongly recommend that you do – you do not want the first time you try a report to be for your exam. You should email your report to me (Darlene.Goldstein at epfl.ch) by Wednesday of the following week so that I have time to return it to you in class Friday. Your report should preferably be a pdf file; ps and dvi are also ok. Please do not send unprocessed tex/latex, or many different pages all in different formats. Is that how you would present your work to an employer?

Here are some web sites that give more detailed information that you might find useful. Note that this does not mean that I require you to do exactly as these say.

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/llc/writecenter/web/labs.html

http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~writing/handbook-lab.html

Happy writing!