How do scientists communicate the results of investigations

Therefore, I start preparing my presentations early, I practice my presentations, and I also seek feedback from my colleagues to make sure my presentations are clear and help my audience learn something new. This way I can feel confident that the science that I love so much is really making the impact that it deserves. Suggested activity: In your next scientific research project, make sure you communicate your results either in a written report or presentation.

GLOBE provides students with guidance for writing scientific reports , as well as opportunities to present and share their research projects. Thinking this.. One important point you left out is verification of the work for factuality. Thats important as a scientist for their reputation. After all you dont want to get laughed out of a conference or a seminar because someone got their facts wrong.

Skip to content. Home About this Blog Getting Started. Climate Analogies: Lessons learned from a student-driven climate change video project. The most important step in science: Communicating your results! Consider this philosophical expression: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Overall, you need to be precise, explanatory, and concise. It needs to be clear what you did, why you did it, and what you found out. The whole point of the exercise is to explain all of the little details, but you should also be fairly brief.

Like I said it takes practice. We recommend reading some good scientific articles to learn about this. The standard scientific paper goes something like this: title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, acknowledgements, and literature cited. Instead of going over them in order of when you see them in a journal or in your final paper, we will go over them in order that you should write them.

Start with the introduction. The introduction should cover some basic information about the system you are working on, what sorts of related things that others have done with your system, what sort of problem you are addressing, and a hint at what you found.

For a science fair project or most science writing in general the introduction should be short. Most are 4 to 8 paragraphs long. You can write an early draft of your introduction before you begin your experiment and use it as a personal guide for how you will think about your project. Next, write the materials and methods section. Herein, you will need to describe what kinds of samples you are working with and where you got them. You will need to describe the conditions you used, the ways that you did your experiment, and any special methods of analysis you used.

Materials and methods sections are unusual in that they are often written in the passive voice. This is because you are the one who did the things to the samples, and a lot of scientists avoid using first person writing when they write anything, but this is changing. Check with any guidelines about this for your science fair before you continue. For the results section, you will need to include numbers, observation, and so on.

You will need to include information about statistical significance, if that is important, as well as brief interpretations. You will likely reference your most important figures and tables in the results section as well.

Keep your sentences simple, since you are only stating fact here and not in depth analysis. Like materials and methods, results sections are often broken down into subsections describing the results of different tests.

Give each one a heading. Many papers include a conclusion section. Sometimes, it is required by the journal. A conclusion is typically 1 to 3 paragraphs that distill the most important points raised in the discussion.

If you include one, keep it brief and poignant. The discussion section is the coup de grace of your paper. In the discussion, you get to tell your readers what this is really all about. You will take the most important results and explain why they matter, what they could really mean, and what sorts of questions they unveil for future investigation. You will need to defend your claims here, and since science is about disproving theories, you will need to suggest some potential problems and pitfalls relating to what you discovered.

Then, you will need to explain why they might not be valid or relevant for your research. In the discussion section, you will need to put your neck out and really stand for your results. There is a little section that you can write any time you like, really, but it usually follows the discussion called the acknowledgements section.

This is usually a very brief paragraph that thanks any non-author who helped in gathering materials, running experiments, giving key advice, creating graphics, etc. If you received outside funding, you should explain who gave it to you, and provide an agreement number, if that is applicable.

Combined, the introduction, materials and methods, results, and discussion comprise the body of your paper. Now, it is time to squish them all together into one paragraph, the abstract.

While this is one of the first things that a reader will encounter, it should be one of the last things you write. The essential gist of the abstract is that it explains what is important about the problem you are addressing, how you approached the problem, what the headline results were, and what their implications are.

Note that some of the titles are more accessible than others. It largely depends on whom the authors wish to reach. Use one or two sentences to describe your system.

Just highlight the aspects of the system that you are addressing. Every sentence of your abstract should be an active and bold sentence. It should be clear and concise. Save your uncertainties for the discussion section and distill everything down to its fundamentals. You have one last little bit to write: the title. Most authors write this last, though if a pithy or really effective title comes to mind at any point during the process, write it down, and it could work.

There are a lot of approaches to writing titles, too. Some of them simply state the finding in a sentence. Others describe what the authors were investigating. You will find the occasional title filled with puns. While there is a lot of flexibility, you should carefully examine what it is that you are trying to do. Puns and humor get attention, but do they get the target audience interested in your topic?

If you give away what you found, will anyone be interested in reading the rest of your paper? You just have to figure out what is most appropriate and what you think best reflects your work. Academic writing, and scientific writing by extension, requires literature citations [3]. There are three ways to do that: use pure reasoning, use your results, or cite literature. You already know about reporting your results. Literature citations serve several purposes. First, they show you did your homework.

Second, they show that what you have to say is backed up by the scientific community at large, placing your own work into the larger scheme of science. Third, they pointreaders to other articles that they might be interested in. Consider when you were doing the literature research putting together your experiment or even writing the paper.

You might have read a paper and seen their own literature citations, and those pointed you toward something else that is useful. You need to pass on the favor. Every journal has a style for literature citations. In the text, there are two common ways to call out a citation.

The most common is to use the author and date. The other format that is occasionally called for is the use of numbers. Numbers between parentheses or in superscript [5] are used after phrases to indicate which reference in an enumerated list you should use.

The format you use for the literature cited section varies widely across journals, so you will need to look up what your science fair guide tells you to do. Note that journals, books, theses, conference proceedings, and so on will require different formats within the literature cited section.

It can take some work getting them right, so be prepared for that extra time. Most scientific works include maps, charts, photographs, drawings, and other images. Collectively, these are called figures , and they are really, really important. Even a serious reader of your paper will gravitate toward the figures first.

Figures can be referenced in any part of the body of the text. If you are formatting your own work, you will need to keep the figure near the text that first references it, but your publisher may request you include all of your figures at the end of the document.

These days, maps are relatively easy to generate. You can grab screenshots from satellite images using software like Google Earth [6]. If you are mapping a study location, you can use drawing software to generate proportional lines and features. You can even use something like PowerPoint to create maps with its drawing tools!

If you use a map, you need to justify why you are including it. Are you showing where your study sites are? It might not be especially important for your conclusions. Sometimes, you can use maps to show results, and if you can, bully for you.

Maps are a truly great way to relate results to the real world. There are a lot of types of charts, and it can be a bewildering thing to figure out which charts you should use. Researchers also share results at national and international meetings and workshops, which are vital to building collaborations and stimulating cross-fertilization of ideas and methods. Learn More. Contact Us. Start Here.