How to Write a Lab Report

Here we provide some basic guidelines for writing lab reports. The guidelines are kept general and offer a framework for writing reports. Many of them are analogous to the general criteria for writing scientific texts, such as Bachelor's and Master's theses or scientific publications.

A scientific text generally serves two important functions:

1. Presentation of results and conclusions. This is the fundamental message you want to convey to the readers. All the important (new) information and ideas need to be included.
2. Transparency and reproducibility of results. Scientific findings only have value if they are reproducible. Write your text in a way that allows others to follow your steps and reproduce your results using your data. This strengthens the credibility and persuasiveness of your findings. In the context of a lab report, this is also important for us to assess how well you have engaged with the topic and understood the details.

These two points are of particular importance in the evaluation of the lab report.

A typical lab report is divided into the following sections:

1. A brief introduction that leads into the topic (can be kept very short in the age of AI).
2. A section on the theoretical background, laying out all the scientific foundations needed to understand the results and conclusions and to follow their derivation (can be kept very short in the age of AI).
3. A general description of the observational data, often together with the data reduction, describing how the raw data are processed into reduced data products. The acquisition of the raw data is also described here.
4. A presentation of the results, including the final data products and direct measurements from the data.
5. The data analysis covers all quantities derived from the results. This includes more extensive calculations based on models and assumptions, as well as derivations of broader relationships and model comparisons.
6. The discussion places the results of the analysis and measurements in a scientific context. The results are examined with regard to their plausibility and possible measurement uncertainties. Potential sources of error are addressed, as well as a comparison with similar experiments from the literature.
7. A references section lists all literature sources used in the course of writing the report, including sources for adapted figures as well as literature values used for assumptions and comparisons.
8. An appendix contains any additional information and figures that are too important to omit but would disrupt the flow of the main text too much.

This is a general overview applicable to most types of scientific texts. Depending on the content or context of the report, however, deviations from this structure may be useful or even necessary to improve readability.

• When thinking about what to include in your report, follow this principle: What does a reader need in order to understand the results and conclusions? What is necessary for a reader to be able to reproduce your steps and, if applicable, understand any deviations from expectations?
• Write in your own words. The lab course supervisors have read dozens of reports and will immediately notice if a text has been written entirely by an AI, for example. If a report is written exclusively by an AI or copied from another source without being clearly marked as such, this will be considered an attempt at plagiarism and will result in immediate disqualification.
• An example of a good, though not perfect, lab report for N2 can be found here. (With thanks to Tomer Shenar and Christoph Guber for providing the report.)

To support you, we have prepared a LaTeX template for a lab report. The template is written in LaTeX and should compile without issues using a standard LaTeX installation. A zipped archive contains all necessary source files, including the template to be edited as well as additional files required for successful compilation. The archive contains the following files:

All other files are generated automatically during compilation.

Based on this template, we have written a short guide that provides advice on how to write a lab report. It is somewhat more comprehensive than what is written here and additionally contains general instructions on typesetting, scientific writing, and a list of useful LaTeX commands.