Writing College Level Scientific Articles

College level scientific lab courses can be quite a bit of work. Between the in-depth experiments and hypothesizing, they also require you to write scientific articles on your findings. So how do you properly write a scientific article for a college level scientific lab course such as Biology or Geology?

Writing a scientific article is much like a normal essay but with several different aspects. Always remember the basic writing guidelines; maintain proper sentence structure and grammar for your readers and produce well written paragraphs and use straight forward writing techniques.

A scientific article is a means for the scientist to elaborate on an experiment he/she conducted. Your scientific article should contain at a minimum five basic paragraphs. These paragraphs will be your introduction, objectives of the experiment, methods and results of the experiment, a discussion of data, and a conclusion type paragraph describing new ideas and future work.

The introduction of the scientific article should contain all the relevant information to introduce your reader to the experiment you performed. It is standard to include any background information regarding previously discovered data you have researched and information on past experiments conducted by yourself or others. Most importantly you will include the hypothesis of your own experiment in this section of your scientific article, usually placed at the end of this introduction paragraph.

A discussion of your objectives should follow the introduction. What are you trying to achieve with the experiment you are conducting? This is a place to be more detailed in your hypothesis and elaborate on the goals of the experiment.

In the next paragraph of your scientific article you should describe the methods and results of your experiment. Depending on the length of information about the methods and results, you may want to split them into separate paragraphs of their own. If it is a small experiment it's all right to combine them as long as the paragraph is structured well. For the part concerning methods, you should describe in detail how you testing your hypothesis. Describe what controls you are using in your experiment, and provide enough detail so that someone else would be able to set up the experiment and repeat it, which is essential for all experimentation. The results section should simply state the data your experiment produced, and should cite any graphical representation or tables of data you've produced (which should also be attached to the article as a reference to your readers).

The following paragraph will be a complete overview and discussion of the data you've accumulated and the results of your experiment. Identify to your readers what it all means, how and if it supports your previously states hypothesis or if the data refutes the hypothesis.

Lastly you should write a standard conclusion of the results. This is a basic overview of the rest of your paper, and standard for similar writing styles.

Along with your graphs, tables, and other relevant experiment data be sure to add a references sheet if you cite any previous experiments in your article, plagiarism is a crime!