Structuring the Narrative
A scientific report has to be detailed enough that someone else could easily understand and replicate your study but equally not include lots of superfluous details that aren’t relevant to your study.
Methodological Rigor and Reporting
More generally, the narrative of a report should start at the beginning of the introduction with quite a broad and opening to the general topic area that you are exploring, that would be easily accessible to the non-scientist reading the report, for example – Since the COVID pandemic we have seen the mental well-being of our young people become progressively worse, in particular the levels of depression….
The introduction should then narrow down to the precise research field that you are investigating and ideally end with a research aim or hypothesis.
The methods describes in details ‘what you did’ in your study, and then the results section describes in detail ‘what you found’. The discussion starts very focussed on linking your results to the aims or hypotheses of the study, it then links these results to the previous research that you cited within the introduction.
Analyzing and Interpreting Results
You can then expand to why your results were different/same to previous findings and why that might be – what were the strengths and weaknesses of your study, are there any applications of your study results and lastly if you were going to continue with your research what would be the next steps – what would be your future research plans.
In this section try and avoid being vague or focussing on minor changes, but be specific and focus on major changes, improvements that would further your research study aims.
For a comprehensive understanding of report structuring and formatting, you can download our PDF example report structure, shared above.
If you are looking for more help, then please feel free to get in touch with me or book a session so we can explore your specific academic report structure.
