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.  

Inserting equations

Here are some tips on formatting equations:

• Number equations for future referencing
• Use an equation editor where necessary to produce clear equations 
• If there is more than one equation, equations should be listed and described separately. 
• They should be indented or centered from the rest of the text
• There should be a space separating them from text both above and below  the equation
• All variables should be defined directly after or directly before the equation

Example:

The annual probability p of a single season without a hurricane landfall was calculated for a 160 year period by   calculating the number of years n without a landfall event over the total number of years N in the dataset:

p = n/N     (1)

The annual probability was used in tandem with the binomial distribution to determine the likelihood P(X) of  X years free of a hurricane landfall occurring over a finite period of N years:

                                                  (2)

Calculations were performed for values of N=11 and X=5. 

Get to the point II: Figures

Figures

When referring to figures in text,

• Introduce the figure and the main point it is intended to convey early in the paragraph before you begin interpreting results.  
• Refer to figures in order of appearance.
• In the middle of the sentence, name of the figure is capitalized and abbreviated (e.g. Fig. 1).
• At the beginning of a sentence, name of figure is capitalized and unabbreviated (Figure 1).
• Dates/time  should be in format: 8 AM EDT 8 September 2012 or 12 UTC  8 September 2012

For the example used in the previous post, the first two sentences could be accompanied by an introduction to a figure:

• "Figure 1 shows the frequency of hurricane force winds along the Florida coastline."
• "The frequency of hurricane force winds along the Florida coastline is shown in Fig. 1."

You could then proceed with a detailed analysis of the figure in question.

Include all information seen in figure
Include the following information in figure where possible

• Figure title
• Contour labels
• Axis labels
• Parameters
• Dates and times

It is also important that figure captions contain the following information if they are not contained in the figure itself:

• Parameters plotted
• Contour intervals with units
• Source

An example

The example below shows a good caption. Note how the units are clearly indicated on the graph, so there is no need to mention in the caption. Times and dates of data are clear. A legend describes the different parameters plotted, so this is not necessary to put in the captions. If these elements were missing, they would need to be in the captions. Note that analysis is done in the text.