The Writer's Handbook

Writing Scientific Reports

This section describes an organizational structure commonly used to report experimental research in many scientific disciplines, the IMRAD format: Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion.

Although the main headings are standard for many scientific fields, details may vary; check with your instructor, or, if submitting an article to a journal, refer to the instructions to authors.

Use the menu below to find out how to write each part of a scientific report.

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Results Section

The section below offers some questions asked for effective results sections in scientific reports.

What did you observe?

For each experiment or procedure:

Briefly describe experiment without detail of Methods section (a sentence or two).
Report main result(s), supported by selected data:
- Representative: most common
- Best Case: best example of ideal or exception

Additional tips:

Order multiple results logically:
- from most to least important
- from simple to complex
- organ by organ; chemical class by chemical class
Use past tense to describe what happened.

What to avoid:

Don't simply repeat table data; select.
Don't interpret results.
Avoid extra words: "It is shown in Table 1 that X induced Y" --> "X induced Y (Table 1)."