Formal Lab Reports

Each experiment you carry out is only truly complete when the results and your conclusions have been reported, in a form useful to other scientists. Since writing reports is an extremely important part of the process of all science and engineering, so also is it an important part of the Physics 209 lab.

From previous years you know some version of the elements required in a scientific report. There is actually a very wide range of forms that reports can take and you will encounter many different formats as you go through your studies and on into jobs in the future. In any given situation you will need to make your own judgements about format, as well as adhering to rules dictated by a particular situation. For instance, scientific journals often have very particular formats, but with some degree of freedom within those standardized rules (For some examples of real journal instructions for authors, have a look at: msprep.html. In this experimental course you will be expected to produce reports that include an abstract, an introduction (can contain introductory material including the context of the experiment and any relevant theory and references), experimental techniques, experimental results, analysis and discussion, and conclusions. Included below is a report of a "pseudo-experiment" whose purpose is to outline this type of structure. This report is generated by the typesetting program LaTeX.

There is no requirement that you use LaTeX to produce your final reports, any word processing system is acceptable. Microsoft WORD, for instance, is commonly used in business and by some scientific journals. However, TeX and LaTeX have substantial advantages because they are typesetting programs specifically designed for preparing scientific and mathematical documents. Their use is now widespread; most theses these days are generated by LaTeX and many scientific journals demand that articles submitted to them be formatted with LaTeX. At the very least, you will find LaTeX useful in your upcoming years here at UBC.

A quick way to get started using LaTeX is to make a copy of the source code for the example report and place it in your own directory for use as a template for your own report. You can use your favourite editor to replace the text with your own text and results. Your source file (filename.tex) can then be processed by the LaTeX processor using the command
latex filename
which produces an output file named filename.dvi
This can be converted into a PostScript file named filename.ps with the command
dvips -o filename.ps filename
and the PostScript file can be printed using
lpr filename.ps
You can view the intermediate dvi file with:
xdvi filename.dvi &
I like to keep an emacs window, a dvi window and a command line window open all the time so I can quickly jump between them.
You can also produce a pdf file from your postscript output with:
ps2pdf filename.ps


The latex source of the example file: reportexample.tex
The postscript file containing the figure that is included into the example: satdat.eps
And a pdf verion of the output: reportexample.pdf