A Scientific report Is a written, visual, or oral document prepared for the purpose of providing information in a logical, clear and orderly manner about any subject, event, or fact that has occurred.
Written reports are often documents that have some very specific content aimed at a particular audience. Usually, reports are used to reveal the results of an experiment or research.
Specifying, a scientific report is a written and published report that describes original research results.
The scientific report must be qualified. This means that it must be written in a certain way and must be published in a particular way, defined by three centuries of developing tradition, editorial practice, scientific ethics, and the relationship between printing and publishing procedures.
What is the purpose of the scientific report?
The scientific reports serve to convey to other scholars in the area the results of certain research or experiments.
A scientific report is considered correct if it is written with enough detail and clarity for any other scientist to repeat the experiment.
A scientific report must provide valid results; As well as must be original. Scientific publications, or journals, are often presented at conferences.
Their results are usually accompanied by tables, graphs, photographs, or diagrams that help to understand the result.
Scientific reports must be written in a scientific, formal, clear, precise and logical language. All scientific reports must adhere to ethics.
Scientific reports began to boom during the 1940s. It began as a document developed in a particular and orderly manner that described the various elements of scientific research.
At the outset, the objective was not publication, rather they were directed or elaborated as a form of instrument that could transmit the results of an experiment to the entire scientific community or to those who originated the process.
All scientific work must relate its results or findings to the procedure with which they were reached. These procedures must also be able to be reproduced at any other time or at any other time.
When is a publication valid?
To correctly define a scientific report, you must define the mechanism that creates the same document, specifically a valid publication.
Abstracts, theses, conference reports, and many other types of literature are published, but these publications do not normally meet the requirements of a valid publication.
In addition, a scientific paper can fulfill all the other elements that usually comprise it, but if it is not published validly and is published in an incorrect place, it has no validity.
This means that a report with relatively poor information, but one that meets most of the elements, which is published in the right place (a scientific journal, for example), can be accepted.
Also, a very well prepared and researched report is not validly published if it is posted in the wrong place.
The definition of what is a valid publication can be complicated, but it is of great importance since it derives the definition of scientific report.
The Board of Biology Editors (CBE), is a professional and authoritative organization that tries to solve problems like these. For this reason he arrived at this definition:
A primary and acceptable scientific publication that should be the first to disclose enough information to enable peers to evaluate observations to repeat experiments, and to evaluate intellectual processes; In addition, it must be susceptible to sensory perception, permanently essential, and available to the scientific community without restriction. It should be available for regular reviews by one or more of the large recognized secondary services (Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Index Medicus, Excerpta Medica, Agriculture Bibliography, etc.) or institutions with similar faculties in each country.
Language of scientific report
The scientific report must have the appropriate language. Scientific knowledge must be communicated effectively, clearly, and in words that contain a specific meaning, so that a scientist can be successful in this work, must be instructed.
As the ultimate goal of a scientific report is publication, scientists must be aware of the responsibilities.
A scientist can spend months, or years working to secure his data, but must communicate them correctly so that the process can be successful.
The language used should not be complicated. Literary tricks, like metaphors for example, take away the attention of the message to the style; Use should be avoided as much as possible. It should be a simple language, without decorations, with a composition that a child can make.
Organization of a scientific report
A scientific report is a document organized to meet the needs of a valid publication. For this reason, a scientific report should be highly stylized, composed of distinctive and clearly evident parts.
Each scientific paper should have in its correct order: its introduction, materials, methods, results, and discussion.
A report should consist of an index, a title, a summary, an introduction, the content, the materials, the procedures, the record of results, the conclusions, and the bibliography.
Summary . In this section you should write a brief description of what the report is about; Serves for the public to check if the report is of interest to them.
Introduction . It should explain the objective of the report, indicating the problem or the motivations that led to the investigation.
Content . It consists of: the materials (the materials and quantities used in the experiment must be listed), the procedures (all the steps that were used to carry out the study), a record of results (graphs, tables, diagrams, etc.) and The conclusions (questions and answers that arose after analyzing the results).
In the conclusion one can confirm or deny the hypothesis that was raised at the beginning.
Bibliography . In this last part of the report should be a list of all publications, texts and scientific journals consulted to make the introduction and to interpret the results.
References
- Definition of a scientific paper. Retrieved from mason.gmu.edu.
- The Scientific Report (2006) Retrieved from abc.com.py.
- What is a scientific report? Retrieved from answers.wikia.com.
- How to write a scientific article or paper? (2017) Recovered from hotcourseslatinoamerica.com.
- What is a scientific report? (2013) Recovered from buenastareas.com.