Question: Just been to the MRC biology lab in Cambridge, what is involved in writing up an experiment?

Christina Pagel answered on 22 Jun 2013:

It depends a bit on which science you are writing up (theory articles are a bit different to lab experiments for example)… The format is actually not that different to school – just more detailed!

Basically, every article should have a description of what the problem, why it’s interesting and what is known about it now (the background/intro); then you have to say what your methods are – detailed enough so that someone else could do the same thing if they wanted to reproduce your results – and you have justify why you’ve chosen to do it the way you have and how you are going to test whether your results tell you something new or not (this is done using statistics usually) and you have to say *before* you do the experiment! Then you say what actually happened when you did the experiment… Finally, you discuss it – put your results in context of other work, say what’s new and why is worth publishing, suggest areas for further research and discuss any limitations of your work and areas of uncertainty…

It’s not that interesting writing up an article (not nearly as nice as doing the research) but it’s really important because that’s scientists know what other scientists are doing… plus, as a university scientist, that’s one of the ways people judge how good you are…