The Structure of a Report

And now we have a fairly standardized line-up of things that happen after this point on. First of all there's going to be an introduction. In this section we outline why we did the work, what the state of knowledge is before we undertook our work – just put the reader in the picture what this is all about. How elaborate you make it, of course, depends on cir­cumstances. You know, some reports have to be, like a thesis would be, very lengthy; some reports to your boss on continuing an experiment that you started in the previous reporting period would be half a page, you know. But in any case this sets the stage for what is to follow.

In experimental studies there is not generally a section called theory – the theory that is needed to understand what happens is usually put in as part of the introduction. But where a study is both theoretical and experi­mental in nature there might, very appropriately, be a section entitled theory, in which the whole theory that is to be tested is developed at some length and evaluated and discussed. I've put a bracket round that to indicate that this is often omitted in experimental thesis, in experimental report.

Well, then there's a description of the apparatus, in which you discuss the equipment that you used. My general comment is: don't put in photographs of apparatus. It simply isn't worthwhile. By all means draw a line diagram in which you point out the appropriate features because anybody can understand a line diagram. And secondly, by all means point out the general weak­ness of the equipment, the features that make it less than ideal because this often helps the reader interpret what follows.

Well, let's carry on. We next come to the results section. Well, this is actually the important section of the paper describing experimental investigation because the results, of course, are the truly significant thing. This is what you did it for. The results are maybe valuable even if the rest of the paper is completely wrong, inappropriate. So perhaps this is the one that you really have to concentrate your attention on. Present your data. What do you present? I suppose one ideal is to present every data point that you ever took. Sometimes this is inappropriate, this may be far too lengthy. You have to then do some selecting. You have to display your re­sults, you have to produce tables, diagrams. All in all, you have to give the reader a flavour of the results that you obtained and really an appropriate description as to what happened when you undertook the experiment. So my gen­eral comment is that it's often appropriate to start writing up the results section of a report while you are still there, you're still tak­ing data and then it often becomes clear that there's a gap and then you can go back and fill the gap. But this is usually the section that is worth writing first, at least that's my own particular opinion.

And lastly there's a discussion section in which you relate the re­sults that you've obtained both in terms of the theory and the state of knowledge at the time that you started the work. Discuss whether what you did was technically or basically a success or failure. Discuss how you, you know, how your results fit in with work of others, with earlier results of yourself, and in general, you know, give the reader an im­pression as to your evaluation of the experiment. Again, the question as to how simple or complex to make this section depends a little bit on just what the purpose of this report is anyway.

Well, in a sense this is the end of the report. On the other hand, we haven't finished yet, we come to a few parts that are often rather tedious but often very important. The first one is recommendation. You don't gen­erally make recommendations in a paper intended for the general public, like a published paper, but you very frequently put in recommendations when you are producing a report that's to be read by a limited number of people, perhaps in your own organization. This recommendation or rec­ommendations are usually what is to be done next. And the time is really important is that if you know that you're going to continue to work in this particular area. Because if you don't make a recommendation then your boss is going to make a recommendation, and unless you tell him what you think ought to be done, don't be surprised if you finish up doing some­thing which you feel is useless. So a recommendation is always an oppor­tunity for you to make things easier for yourself the next time around. So, by all means put in a recommendation when it's a private report.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements is the most important thing in a published report, a published paper and probably also in privately circulated reports. For reasons that I do not fully understand, scientists are amazingly, incredi­bly sensitive about having their contributions acknowledged. It's psy­chotic in many cases. I've known quarrels of thirty years duration arise because somebody didn't acknowledge the fact that somebody else said something that may have helped him or that had written an earlier paper in this particular field. My thesis supervisor, an old and far wiser man, said, "Look Ernie. You know, it's a trivial issue – you've got forty-three references already. Put in forty-four and you'll keep this guy happy and so what?" And I think that's a wise attitude… It's so easy. It's a trivial thing. It takes up about five lines in a text and it's generally wiser to make this list of acknowledgements a little larger than you think it really ought to have been.

References

Well, now we come to the references. The two aspects of that – the first one is, you know, you really ought to put in as many references as are appropriate in the paper. In terms of information the references are the most concentrated part of the paper. You can supply the reader with more information by a page of references than you can by a page of almost any other part of the paper. I hate to see a paper with no references whatever. It makes me think the author's trying to give the impression that he invented this field all by himself. It doesn't make it easy to go back and, you know, and learn a little more about this par­ticular field. On the other hand, a well-chosen list of references can really help a reader who wants to pursue a subject further, he can find out what the author knew when he started, what earlier work there's been in the area and it really can be awfully helpful.

How these references are listed is a standing dispute. Every journal, every organization has one method of listing references and no other is accepted. You know, like do you put the initials before the author? Do you put the date or the year right after the author or right at the end?

You'd be surprised how many combinations of methods there are. I think that I worked out the other day that there are at least two thousand generally accepted methods of producing references. And for each jour­nal or each organization that produces reports, there's generally only one correct method. Well, don't fight it! Join it! I mean nothing is gained by starting a campaign that your method of producing references is bet­ter. The only thing where I think some initiative is allowed, for example, on whether to cite the title of an article – some organizations give you certain leeway on that. On that I'm convinced that you always want to put in the title of an article, it helps the reader a lot in deciding whether to go on with it or not.

If you're citing a foreign paper you often have a choice. You can display your erudition by giving the title in whatever foreign language the paper was in and leaving it that way, and then that leaves all the readers who don't know that for­eign language just saying, "Gee, this guy's obviously smart but so what?" I think the only appropriate method is to give a translation of the title into English and then at the brackets comment to the fact that the orig­inal paper was in Russian or German or Hindustani – whatever lan­guage it was in. But, I don't think it helps, for scientists, anyway, maybe different, to give the title in Spanish say, and just leave it at that and hope that something will happen, because nothing will happen.

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