How to read a scientific report

Scientific or technical reports

Reports are different than scientific papers in that they do not represent original research. Rather their purpose is to summarize the latest scientific research for non-scientists. Care is taken to make sure the language is less technical and more accessible to non-scientists. They usually have different chapters that may address different audiences and interests. For example, they may have different chapters addressing the effects of climate change on different sectors of the economy or different regions of the world, or different ecosystems.

Often, you may only be interested in a small section or chapter of the report. Therefore, you should always check the table of contents for the topic of interest. Different chapters usually have different authors, so you may need to cite the specific chapter in the references and the specific author in the text.

In government or academic reports, you may copy and paste tables or figures provided that you cite and reference them to give credit. If you do not do this it is considered plagiarism as the assumption is that the figures are your own. Some private organizations may demand that you ask permission: this is usually a formality, especially in the case of a student paper, but some organizations can be very proprietary about this.  

Paragraph Structure

Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that acts as a thesis statement and summarizes your paragraph. If you are doing a literature review and summarizing other people's work, include the source that contains the information outlined in the paragraph. Use the active voice if possible.

Literature review and introduction

A literature review in an introduction provides an overview of past and current work in your research topic. It is usually summarized in the introduction of a thesis, and sometimes appears as a separate section. It outlines the main research questions faced in a given domain of research, and provides motivations and justifications for pursuing your research into the topic. As many students on an undergraduate level will not pursue a career in research, it's particularly important for an undergraduate thesis to understand the societal relevance of a topic and to anticipate applications of the research to "real-life" situations. Therefore, the literature review is often accompanied  by a description of the societal relevance of the research.

Literature reviews can be found in the introduction  practically in any refereed journal article. Almost every sentence in the introduction of most papers contains large numbers of citations, as the introduction summarizes the most  important facts, theories and science on which your paper rests on. You can (almost) never have to many references in an introductory literature review.

Get to the point I: Paragraph structure

Paragraph Structure

Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that acts as a thesis statement and summarizes your paragraph. If you are doing a literature review and summarizing other people's work, include the source that contains the information outlined in the paragraph. Use the active voice if possible.


Prefaces and Segues

A common mistake many students make in scientific and technical writing is to preface paragraphs containing important information about the atmosphere with unnecessary segues and prefaces:

 "Studies of hurricanes have shown that they are a dangerous phenomenon. They represent an important aspect of the tropical environment."

This may be okay in oral presentations, conversation, literary work,  personal diaries, and rants on blogs, but only wastes valuable space in technical reports and science papers. You want to make it as easy as possible for your reader to get the information they need to know.


References and example

It is good style to begin any paragraph with the main point. It is equally good style to begin the first sentence of the paragraph with the reference that backs up this point:

"Smith et al. (2010) showed that  hurricanes can cause significant amounts of damage when they strike populated areas. "
            
This forces you to use the active voice, makes it clear that you are presenting information from an authoritative source, and makes subsequent referencing unnecessary.

If you need to provide secondary references that add to the credibility of the information, this can be done with brackets:

"They used 6-hourly sea-level pressure fields from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (Kistler et al. 2001) for the years 1951-2000 to examine hurricane tracks in the North Atlantic Ocean. " 


This gives the reader information  they can use to assess the quality of the study and to reproduce the results if necessary.

 If the order of the above sentences were reversed, the paragraph is less clear because the secondary (albeit important) information appears first, and the main point of the paragraph second. Your reader will mumble under his breath "Get to the point".