BIOL 130L Research Guide: Reading Lab Reports and Articles

Read that first! A well-written abstract for a scholarly article should provide a concise overview of the entire article. This will allow you to identify articles that you need to explore further.

The abstract alerts you to a potentially useful or interesting article, OR there is no abstract:

These sections help summarize the information in the article, so you can decide if you need to study the important and detailed information and data contained within the Materials and Methods, and Results sections.

In a shorter lab report, the discussion is usually separate from the Results section, so it serves as the conclusion as well. But in longer lab reports or in many types of scholarly articles, it is common to have the discussion included within the results section itself, and have the conclusion as a separate section.

The final sections you want to read are the Materials and Methods; and Results sections, and this is because they contain all the details of the experiment, or all of the critical factors that that led to the author’s conclusions.

These sections will often contain all of the raw data (if any), as well as tables, figures and diagrams. Because these sections contain the most amount of detail and all the critical information associated with the experiment or argument, this is where the reader needs to spend the most of their time.