Lab Report assignment: 1.

Your lab group will be writing a lab report or paper over one of your independent investigations (your choice). It should be in scientific format, with a title, abstract, introduction, materials/methods, results, and discussion sections as well as acknowledgments and literature cited. Be sure you are intimately familiar with each section and what information belongs in each. You should also be certain you understand what it means to write in scientific format. Figures should be labeled and captioned, all works cited must be cited in the paper, materials and methods should be in paragraph format (not bulleted or numbers), etc. If you've questions about proper formatting, read through your journal sources and Appendix B in your lab manual, and if you still have questions please ask me. These will display proper technique for writing as well as proper section information. If the journal article does not follow this guide or the appendix in your lab manual, then this guide and your lab manual should take precedence. 2. Things that should not be included: first- or second-person language, informal language including contractions, typos (and the like), t-test calculations (only the results, please, reported properly), raw data, extraneous information, "filler" citations (only cite relevant sources, and do so properly), page breaks between sections and avoid extra white space (use text wrapping to place text around your figures). 3. Your paper must have a minimum of 3 primary sources. You can easily find these via Google Scholar, Web of Science or the library databases. Be sure you double-check your source, however. The Wall Street Journal is not, after all, a peer-reviewed journal! Remember, that these are minimum values. You may, of course, have more sources and more primary sources. Additional sources must conform to scientific standards. Encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), dictionaries, and websites (aside from online journal copies, etc.) are not admissible as sources, and you will be penalized accordingly if they are used. You should cite your lab manual if you modified a protocol from it. Be aware that you can request most journal articles from InterLibrary Loan, but this process can take several days, so DO NOT WAIT to do your research. 4. There is no formal page limit. It must be long enough to cover the subject material in adequate depth. Two or three pages will almost certainly fail to accomplish this. Twenty pages is overboard. Your paper should be double-spaced (not single, not 1.5) with 1" margins on all sides and does not have columns, so I have room to write comments. Remember that the rough draft is basically a finalized product. It is weighted more heavily as this should be where the bulk of your work is completed. The final should be nothing more than an exercise in revision. You are to include at least one self-generated figure. It may not depict raw data nor should it depict t-tests. It should be an at-a-glance idea of your results, and it should follow proper convention (title, legend, meaningful caption, in-text reference/explanation, etc.). 5. I cannot read your paper ahead of the due date. I am unable to offer this to everyone, and it isn't fair to only do it for some people. I can, and will, answer any specific questions (reading a section of your paper is not a specific question) you may have. Be sure you do not save them for the last minute, and remember that I need at least 24 hours time in which to respond to your emails, 48 hours on the weekends due to my research schedule.