Research Experience for Teachers

Description of the Scientific Process: Communicating Your Results

Communicating Your Results

The final step in science is communicating your findings. While the public thinks of scientists as people who work in labs and who write confounding equations on chalk boards, scientists are also writers and speakers. You can do all of the lab work, field work, observations, calculations, research, and analysis you want, but if you never get your work out for, you may as well never have done your research. Science fairs are excellent ways to practice this aspect of science, and we hope that you enjoy communicating your results. We will discuss the primary ways that scientists communicate: with writing, with posters, and with presentations.

Writing

Good writing is a skill that you can use in many walks of life, and even if you never really use it professionally, you can use it personally and even romantically! How can science writing be romantic? Mostly, it can’t, but writing is writing, and being good at one kind can help you be good at other kinds. In your English classes, you should be learning all of the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Those are reasonably universal, and even when you write poetry or the sloppy slang of your fictional cowboy, it really helps to know what rules you are actually breaking (since you can break them better that way.) Just developing the swagger to put words onto your page is really helpful. Learn how to write, as it is a great skill.

Before digging into the nitty-gritty of science writing in particular, it is worthwhile to relay some advice to you about writing in general. We’re not going rehash, subjects, predicates, gerunds, and commas, but you should remember all of those rules. It saves time in the editing process, and it makes you look smart. Having graded some college papers, we can tell you that students make very different kinds of mistakes when they write. While one student will frequently use incomplete sentences, another will have run-on sentence after run-on sentence. You have to know your strengths and your weaknesses. Remedy those grammatical weaknesses, and you will save yourself a lot of grief.

As is true with many things, practice is necessary to develop as a good writer. While you may only produce a few papers for your classes every semester, you should consider come other ways to practice.

• Write for fun and profit. Make up short stories, poems, or opinion articles. Even if they’re not good, it’s still practice. Maintain a blog or a gallery of your work. As you write, you will understand writing more, and if you do it for fun and not in fear of teacher’s red pen, you can better associate writing with pleasure.
• Use good writing in text messages and on social media. Instead of abbreviating everything and not caring how your sentence comes off, make a solid effort to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation with your peers. Your generation writes a prodigious amount of text, so you have no excuses for writing it poorly. If your friends make fun of you for doing so, just tease them for their bad spelling and move on. Writing well should be a habit.
• Read. Read books, magazine articles, and blog posts. Read fiction, poetry, science, and history. When you read, have opinions not just about the content of what you are reading but the quality of the authorship. Copy styles you like and understand why you don’t like what seems bad to you.
• Read a few writing guides. John’s very favorite is “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, but there are lots of others out there. The National Center of Biotechnological Information (NCBI) also has a guide to writing scientific papers.

When you write, you create a voice. Just as it is with a person’s audible voice, there are lots of ways to describe a written voice[1]. You can also write in different voices depending on your audience and your intent. When we write scientific papers, we follow a very different style and present a very different voice than what we are writing with here. In this work, we are trying to be familiar and warm. We are avoiding too many unnecessary technical terms without sounding condescending. We can use the words “we” and “you” with abandon. Scientific papers are very different. In those, we have to be precise and very detailed. The writing is colder, but that’s okay, because the purpose and the audience are different. It is more important for a scientific reader to very clearly understand exactly what we mean by something, so there is more jargon. The priorities are different, and you have to appreciate the different motives of the reader.

Let’s get down to brass tacks in discussing what you need to do when you write a scientific article. 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. Most papers aren’t actually written in that order, though. 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. Even though it’s not the first thing you see when you look at a paper, it’s very easy to write it first. 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. Either, “50 mL of water was added to the solution, and pH was taken again,” or, “We added 50 mL of water to the solution and remeasured pH,” are usually acceptable. 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.

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. Here’s a basic approach to writing an abstract[2]:

Use one or two sentences to describe your system. Just highlight the aspects of the system that you are addressing.

1. Use one or two sentences to describe your methods. You don’t need to include specific numbers like how many mL of water you added to each sample, unless that’s what you were varying. You need to include kinds of materials you used and the ways you varied your methods.
2. State what your basic results are in 1 to 3 sentences. Only include headline numbers. If your results are more qualitative, then do not worry about the specific numbers.
3. State what this means to the field of study in one sentence. This final sentence encapsulates what it is you did, and it is the single most important sentence of your entire paper. What are your implications? What has this changed about how we understand the world? No pressure.

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]. Here’s the deal: in a scientific paper, when you make a claim, you have to back it up. There are three ways to do that: use pure reasoning, use your results, or cite literature. Pure reasoning is helpful, but it’s not actually that common in scientific papers, because science is largely evidence-based. You already know about reporting your results. Citing literature is just you saying, “Hey, this guy already showed that this is true, so I don’t have to totally rehash whatever it is he said.”

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. You can make a claim and then finish it with “(Smith 2012),” “(Chu and Mustafa 2009),” or “(Talbot et al[4]. 1993).” If it makes a sentence work better, you can write something like, “Smith (2012) reported that…” That is an especially useful way to keep the active voice when you write. 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. Keeping an active voice when using these or even talking about them can be difficult, but you can use something like, “A previous study¹³⁴ reported that…” Note: if you have more than 100 references, you need to cut back.

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. Each entry will include the authors’ last names and initials, the year of publication, the title, and the work it was published in. 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? Ask yourself if it’s important for the reader to see exactly where they are or how they are laid out. 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. Here is a list of the most common charts your will see with the reasons that you might want to use them:

• Bar/Column[7] Chart. These charts include masses representing data from different categories so that the reader can visually compare magnitude. When it’s important to display how different treatments produced different (or similar) magnitudes in a response variable, you should use a bar or column chart. If you have statistical significance information, you can also include error bars that can indicate how different your responses are from each other.Line Chart. These charts typically show how a response variable changes over time or space. The x-axis needs to involve a variable that changes continuously for your sample. Too often, people use line charts when they should use bar/column charts or scatter plots.
  • Stacked Bar/Column Chart. This variation on theme includes multiple contributing factors to response variables. You might show increased vegetation for the treatment in general, but with a stacked bar/column chart, you can show which kinds of vegetation increased along with the overall trend in one figure.
• Scatter Plot. Use scatter plots when you intend to show how two variables relate to each other. Most often, scatter plots are used for correlations, in which case, you may want to include a trend line as well as an r value or R² value.
• Pie Chart. Pie charts are used to show what proportions different categories make up of a whole. They are excellent for surveys of wildlife, soils, opinions, and such.

Many papers include photographs or drawings of specimens or apparatuses. If you want to include some, consider why you are doing so. Do you need to convey how you did an experiment, and words just won’t do the job? Are you describing the feature of interest some test subject and need to display a typical example? If you answered yes, then you should include a photograph or drawing. Keep in mind that most papers do not include them, and those that do use them sparingly[8].

A drawn model is one special kind of figure that is useful in some more conceptual papers. Sometimes, scientists include cartoon[9] drawings of their systems or hypothetical connections among different components of bigger concepts. These might appear as flowcharts or Venn diagrams. If you can describe your theory using a drawn model, then you might be able to better convey your ideas. If you can’t, do not fret, for such things are not found in most papers, even most great papers.

Tables are like figures, but papers tend to treat them as a separate class of things. Tables can be used to organize materials and methods or to display results. In general, tables are good at displaying relatively small quantities of numerical or textual information that are really boring to try to explain in the text. You can take any table ever created and describe its contents in words only, but that text would be really boring. You should then use tables to organize basic information for the reader’s sake.

For all of your figures and tables, you will need captions. These little bits of text need to describe how to read their reference and not necessarily interpret what the item says. You will do that in the body of the work. More elaborate figures need legends for your reader to quickly translate colors and symbols.

Posters and Displays

While the public perceives science fair projects with their trifold posters and experimental representations to be the realm of the elementary or high school student, professional scientists more or less do the same thing professionally. We often see bewildered looks on the faces of non-scientists when we describe the quintessential scientific activity of the poster session. We scientists often take our work and sum it up on a 4’×3’ printed poster that we take to a scientific meeting and stand there while other scientists wander by with plates of hors d'oeuvres to consider and discuss our findings. It is really not unlike a science fair. Indeed, the poster or display may be your most important final product for your science fair project, so you should really consider what you are doing at this point.

You might not have this problem, but many scientists struggle with their posters. Few of us have been formally trained in graphic arts, so we first approach our poster as a paper, and that is quite bad. If you walk the halls of a science department a major university, you might encounter some posters that were considered afterthoughts to the all-important papers[10] on which they were based. These posters are difficult to approach, since they are gigantic columns of text spread out on a big piece of glossy paper.

That leads to the first important lesson about the poster that you will no doubt include in your display: base it around your graphics. Your key charts, photos, and tables will draw the eye before your big and bold title will, so they have to be the centerpieces of your poster. They need to be big enough to decipher from four or five feet away with clear captions. While some photographs like pictures of you and your peers laboring away at your study site are not appropriate for papers, they often make great fillers of space and conversation starters when they are appear on posters.

Still, posters need text, and you will have to do some writing. You will need a title that catches the attention of your audience (and especially your judges.) You are more free to be a bit funny with poster titles than you are with paper titles, since you will need to be approachable as you man your display. You will also need to include the names of the authors of the poster, typically right under your title. While the text sections are less formal than one finds in papers, they are usually broken down into introduction material, materials and methods, results and discussion, and conclusions.

In the introduction, you will need to include very brief background material for your project. Limit this to six sentences maximum. You will also need to show a goal or hypothesis that you tested. Again be clear. The materials and methods should be extremely short, listing the kinds of tests you performed and the kinds of materials you used. Results and discussion sections are usually combined into one section to briefly highlight what important things were found and how they related back to the original goals of the experiment. Conclusions are usually limited to four to six sentences.

You can use bullet points instead of flat text on your poster, since you are only highlighting important information. This method can save you a lot of writing effort, since you needn’t concern yourself with transition phrases and the like. Readers tend to like bullet points, too, since they draw the eye. How many times have you seen paragraphs with text interspersed with bullet points and skipped straight to the bullet points?

Pay attention to fonts and font size. In the world of fonts (or typefaces, as they are more accurately called) there are two classes: serif and sans serif. Serif fonts (like Times New Roman, the font in which this text is written) have little feet adorning them. In general, they are considered to be easier to read in large quantities, as you would find in a book or news article. Sans serif fonts (like Arial or Helvetica) lack these and are considered to be more attractive for things like signs and titles. You can consider using a serif font for the text blocks and bullet points and a sans serif font for the title and headers, but if you do, make sure to play with them until they seem to match. Font size should be large enough that your less youthful instructors and judges can read your sections without overstraining. I would recommend keeping most text about at an 18-point font. Make sure that your font sizes are consistent amongst sections and headers, too.

You need to be especially careful in making the widths and margins of your poster consistent. The easiest way to do this is to pick numbers and use the number fields instead of manually moving them around your poster with your mouse. Text boxes and figures may look okay on your computer screen, but you need to ensure that they are consistently proportioned and positioned, since after they are blown up, those small differences become big differences.

Presentations

Oral presentations are the third way that scientists present information. These days, we speak to groups of people using PowerPoint slideshows, possibly demonstrating aspects of our research with props. You may have stage fright, and you would not be alone. Imagine carefully assembling your results and conclusions for an audience who will stare at you as you talk about them for about twenty minutes. Now, imagine that they will ask critical questions about what you did (and didn’t do.) That’s giving a presentation, and we don’t mean to scare you, but you have to prepare yourself emotionally as well as technically for the exercise.

Your talk will be divided in a similar way as that of a paper, but since the reader can’t skip around or go back as you give your presentation in real time[11], you will have to very deliberately go through certain steps. First, present the basic system you are working on, describing what is known about it and any interesting information you know about it. You can talk about a few things that you wouldn’t mention in a paper, since you have to entertain as well as inform, so now is the time to mention how many cool things your research subjects can do.

After your background information has been covered, you will need to describe what your objectives are and what you hypothesized. This step informs your audience of the scope of your study and what they should look out for as you progress through your story. You should then spend a short amount of time on your materials and methods. Students[12] are frequently tempted to spend far too much time on materials and methods, since they feel more intimately familiar with them. Just talk about how you approached the problem briefly. Only linger on parts that you think your audience might find novel or difficult.

You should focus the bulk of your presentation on your results, because this is the most important part of a talk. You will need to communicate exactly what you found and what your statistical analyses uncovered. Be descriptive and interpret your numbers into real-world terms that your audience can appreciate. Next, summarize what you found and speculate about the meaning of your work. That speculation can bring out later dialog, so don’t be shy about it. You can then move on to suggest what needs to be done next to address what you speculate. Finally, thank your collaborators and helpers and open yourself up to questions.

Typical scientific talks involve accompanying slideshows (almost always made in PowerPoint.) Since we are visual creatures, it is important that your slideshow itself be very good—appealing, not distracting, informative, and supportive of your words. Here is some miscellaneous advice for making good slideshows:

• Minimize text. People don’t read and listen well at the same time. Any text you include should simply outline what you are going to talk about. There are exceptions, of course, but few slideshows are improved through the addition of more text.
• Try to include at least one graphic per slide. If people have something to look at on the screen, then they will do so. It is especially important to include lots of charts and such as you present your results. People like to see what they are hearing.
• Use big fonts. Projectors vary in quality, and people often sit far away from the screen.
• Transitions and animations are nice, but don’t overdo it.

Giving presentations well takes experience, practice, and raw talent. You are young, so you must be forgiven for inexperience, and you cannot help it if you lack raw talent (but bully for you, if you have it.) You can, however, practice. There are several reasons to do so. First, you can find the spots in your presentation in which you are unsure of what to say and fix them. Everyone has these points in their talks in which they are not sure how to transition from one topic to another, and you can practice different approaches. Second, things that often sound good in our heads sound really stupid when we talk. Third, you have to get the timing right. If you are given 20 minutes for a talk, you need to make sure you time it right. Also, you can get a lot of help through practicing with an audience of people who want to watch you succeed like your parents, teachers, and friends[13]. They can give you good feedback to improve your talk.

When you present, you need to do several things to look and sound good. Make sure to wear appropriate clothing and be well-groomed. When you speak, try to suppress the urge to fidget or pace. Tics can be hard to suppress, and everyone has their own, but you can fight them and do a better job. Speak confidently. You may not feel confident, but you have to pretend that you are. Smile. If you force yourself to smile and project positivity, eventually you will internalize that. You may need to modulate your speed, and that is what practice is for.

[1] Frequently, we talk about voice in writing in terms of active and passive. In the active voice, subjects do things. In the passive voice, things are done to the subjects. “Plants are taller with more fertilizer,” is an active sentence. “Addition of fertilizer has resulted in taller plants,” is a passive sentence. Avoid the passive voice. Embrace the active voice. Too many scientists use the passive voice in papers, and that just makes me sleepy. Don’t make me sleepy.

[2] I have proposed a basic approach here, but occasionally, different journals, or perhaps your science fair guidelines, will specify how they want to abstract to pan out. Typically, the only requirement is a maximum word count, anywhere from about 150 to 300 words. Sometimes, the journal will dictate style and form.

[3] John’s note: when I was a younger student, I hated citing literature, and that was probably because I didn’t understand what I was doing. Now, I’m kind of addicted to them.

[4] Et al. is an abbreviation for the Latin phrase “et alii” which means “and others.” You use it when there are more than two authors. A lot of papers have three or more authors. Some papers discussing really large projects like draft genomes or gigantic particle physics accelerators can have dozens of authors.

[5] Like the number referencing this footnote.

[6] Make sure to cite your use of mapping software and images.

[7] Technically, bar charts have horizontal bars, and column charts have vertical bars, but people often refer to column charts as bar charts.

[8] One major reason for this is that journals like to charge for colored figures. They like to charge a lot, and black and white photographs might not be good for what you are showing.

[9] Not silly ones like Garfield, The Far Side, or xkcd… usually.

[10] And yes, peer-reviewed papers are more important, but good posters promote good dialog, and good dialog promotes good science.

[11] This isn’t true of recorded presentations, of course, but even when you give one, you will likely have a live audience. Webinars are relatively recent sorts of presentations. The word “webinar” is a portmanteau of World Wide Web and seminar. Webinars are essentially virtual meetings, and they can often be recorded for future audience members.

[12] This includes graduate students, so don’t take it too personally when we say “students.”

[13] You can use pets as audiences, too. They are pretty non-judgmental, though they can be rather insulting when they just curl up and take a nap during when you reach a really cool figure.

Introduction

Observation and Finding a Problem to Study

Designing Your Experiment

Running Your Experiment

Analyzing Your Data

Interpretting Your Results

Glossary of Terms

Appendix: Guide for Using Excel for Statistics and Charts