Our starting point is the practical issue of what a laboratory report should contain in the assignments in this class. Our philosophy is that the report should have the same basic structure as a research article published in the literature. The principle for writing is that you should use scientific prose using complete sentences to describe all aspects of the work. A report should not have bulleted lists. If you need to present information as a list then it should be in a table format with a label, such as Table 1 and a title explaining what the content of the table is. The report should have appropriate literature citations. These should be in the same form as you find in an American Chemical Society journal article. Keep in mind that the only websites that are valid as references are databases or governmental websites that are of a permanent nature. If a newspaper is cited for any reason (not so likely in this course) then you should cite the date and issue of the paper version. Most of the citations will be other journals in ACS format.

Writing a lab report

Organization of a scientific paper

The following segment provides instructions on the order of composition of a scientific mansucript. It provides reasons for the indicated order that shouldhelp you to see the big picture.

How to write a scientific paper

Language points

The following segment contains commonly misunderstood or misused parts of speech. Even native speakers will frequently make certain mistakes. This is intended to help you check your usage.

Scientific English language usage

Literature searches

Conducting a good literature search is extremely important in science. This segment gives some basic ideas of how to use the tools of a literature search. We use Web of Science as the search engine since it has the most comprehensive database and it has an excellent search algorithm.

Literature searches

Ethics in scientific writing

There are numerous ways in which you can fall into an ethical trap in science. The first of these is plagiarism. Avoiding plagiarism seems easy enough: just do not copy other people writing. However, if you are doing extensive literature searches and taking copious notes, sometimes you may get confused about what you wrote and what you wrote down while reading other peoples work. You need to be very careful. You need to understand that the definition that is now being employed states that if 10 consecutive words are copied without attribution (i.e. quotation marks and referencing) then it is plagiarism. Of course, like many things this extreme definition serves to remind us of the gravity of the problem. The key point in plagiarism is not steal or use other people intellectual products, not their artistic language, their scientific ideas or results or their conclusions. In writing about your scientific results you should be rigously truthful about all aspects. Don't cut corners. Don't throw away data. Don't coverup inconsistencies. Here too, there are ways to fool oneself and it is not always those will be intentions who run into trouble. This segment discusses some of the thorny issues that you may encounter while writing a lab report for this course. Remember, referencing other people's work is essential, copying it is absolutely forbidden. If you copy, you will be found out. This segment shows how. It describes the approach known as ETBlast. This is but one of the kinds of software that detect plagiarism.

ET Blast searches for copied text

Examples of ETBlast searches

This segment contains some examples of some ET Blast searches.

ET Blast searches