Lab Report Guidelines
Your lab report should follow the format of a scientific article. For example, you can find the submission guidelines for the journal Nature here. You can find a journal from your field and use their submission guidelines if you do not like the format of the Nature articles.
The lab reports does not have any minimum or maximum length. It should be long enough to contain and thoroughly explain your project. Each section (except the abstract) should be a few pages in length including relevant figures, tables, and equations.
A full lab-report must have the following section: abstract, introduction, methodology, results and discussion, conclusion, and references. If you are only submitting one section of a lab report it still must contain a reference section with in-text citations.
Abstract: An abstract is a summary of your work in one paragraph. It could contain a couple of sentences introducing your problem and why it should be studied, a couple of sentences explaining how you did your machine learning analysis, and a couple of sentences explaining your results.
Introduction: The introduction to your paper is where you introduce the problem you are trying to solve and how you will solve it. You should explain the data set you are working with, why the problem you are trying to solve is important, and details about the methods you chose.
Methodology: This section is also called “Methods” or “Experimental,” depending on the journal on which you are basing your report format. Here is where you explain how you carried out the theoretical models, experiment, and data analysis. It should be to the level of detail that someone can read this section and exactly recreate what you did.
Results and Discussion: In the results and discussion section, you present your results from performing your analysis and discuss if the experimental results match the predicted theoretical models. You can also use this space to explore and plot the data set if you find this helpful in explaining your results. You can also use this space to discuss factors such as the time taken for the analysis and experiment, changes that had to be made to the methodology to make it work, and any problems you encountered performing the analysis. This section should contain graphs and/or tables with captions to help with your explanations.
Conclusion: The conclusion is where you reflect on whether you could fully solve the problem you set out to do. What are other avenues of research that could be performed using the results you discovered? If you could not fully answer the problem you set out to, what could future researchers do to improve your results?
References: This should be a list of formatted citations for all references you used in this work. You should also include in-text citations where appropriate.
All images and tables included in the report must be numbered and captioned.
You must include references for all information and images you did not create directly. You must provide in-text citations and a reference list at the end of your paper.