Generalities

It is not possible to prescribe a fixed structure for a good report. In general, reports would most likely contain:

• Title and Author Names - include the name of your lab partner.
• Introduction - describe the theme of the lab and explain why the topic is important.
• Details - The structure of the sections containing the detailed information may vary depending on the experiments. You should structure this part in a way that is logical and that makes the report readable and concise. In this semester I expect that you typically need to address in some way or form
  • Theory
  • Experimental Setup / Procedures / Materials & Methods
  • Results / Analysis.
• Discussion / Conclusion - Describe the key things that you discovered, learned, or measured in this laboratory.
• Bibliography - references go here

To smooth issues of typesetting, I do provide a simple LaTeX template below.

Typesetting & LaTeX

Introduction

I do not require that you use LaTeX, but it is strongly recommended. I do require professional looking typesetting of the report, thus something that is comparable to a LaTeX formatted text is required.

If you need more precise and detailed guidelines, follow those of professional journals such as Physical Review.

Fake Report

You all know what a scientific article looks like, but anyway, here is a fake article that is floating around the Internet and is meant to illustrate the main ingredients.

Not So Fake Sample Report

To be slightly more helpful, I thought I provide a sample including the LaTeX code. Since making up stuff is way to hard, I took a published paper of mine and turned that into a sample-report. I made a few changes to make it about 90% understandable, hopefully. These changes aside, the report has essentially the scope of a published scientific paper and is thus quite a bit more extensive than is expected for the J-lab reports. However, it should give you some idea about the amount of details contained in experimental physics papers, the work that goes into motivating the research, and the extend of a background review.

The files that are associated with the sample report are:

• Report_illing_bpchaos.pdf - the compiled sample report
• Report_illing_bpchaos.tex - the corresponding LaTeX source file
• references.bib - the BibTeX bibliography source file
• The following figures
  • Fig1.pdf
  • Fig2.pdf
  • Fig3.pdf
  • Fig5.pdf
• apsrevlong.bst - the BibTeX stylefile that I use
• Report_template.tex - Most fundamental LaTeX skeleton without any content

If you prefer, here are all the above files in one neat zipped directory

• report_template.zip

Compiling

I use BibTeX, that is, the references are pulled from a BibTeX data base (unimaginatively named references.bib) that is separate from the sample-report .tex file (Report_illing_bpchaos.tex). To properly include all the references in the report, you need to invoke:

• pdflatex Report_illing_bpchaos
• bibtex Report_illing_bpchaos
• pdflatex Report_illing_bpchaos
• pdflatex Report_illing_bpchaos

(Note that in most Macintosh programs, such as TeXShop, pdfTeX is invoked by default, so that in TexShop the latex command actually implements pdflatex under the default setting.)

apsrevlong.bst: Nonstandard style hacked by L. Illing to give article titles but otherwise conform to the apsrev bibliography style. You need to obtain apsrevlong.bst from the course webpage (see above) and put it in the directory where your .tex file sits or otherwise properly link to the style file from within your .tex source file. apsrevlong.bst is not contained in any standard LaTeX distribution. You are of course free to choose a different style-file, but I do prefer to see the titles of the cited articles.

BibTeX

The disadvantage of using BibTeX is that you have to get a whole other program to work with your LaTeX file and you have to deal with errors that arise if the .bib file is not correctly formatted. (See the %-comments at the end of the sample file for an alternative.)

The advantage of using BibTeX is that you do not have to worry about correctly formatting the reference section, this is done for you by the chosen BibTeX stylefile (.bst extension).

The other advantage is, that you can use bibliography programs such as jabref or endnote to organize the bibliography file (I have used jabref and quite like it.). From online databases such as Web of Science you can directly export lists that can be read by endnote and jabref. Thus, you do not need to type in any of the information. Knowing how to do this might be handy when writing a thesis where you have to cite, potentially, many articles.

The main thing you have to do, once the reference information has been imported into a bibliogrphy .bib file using jabref, let's say, is to generate a citation-key (such as foo2008) for each reference. You can do this by hand or use the magic wand button in jabref. Then simply include `\cite{foo2008}' into your .tex file and the appropriate reference will be pulled from the .bib database, correctly formatted, and put at the end of your report when you compile your latex document as described above.

Here is a link to a description of how to interface endnote and BibTeX.

Jabref and Journal abbreviations

Some BibTeX stylefiles have included a list of abbreviations for the journals that are most often cited. Upon compiling the LaTeX file, BibTeX will attempt to replace the journal titles with the appropriate abbreviation. However, that only works if in the .bib database the journal names are in a `standard' form. Unfortunately, the journal names that are imported from the different databases, such as Web of Science or Inspec, are not always in the right form. It is therefore worthwhile to have more fine control over the journal names as written to the .bib-database.

I use jabref and a journal abbreviation file (see below) to make sure the journal names are saved in the correct abbreviated form to the .bib file (e.g. references.bib). In jabref, I use the Toogle abbreviation button to see if the journal title toogles between the full name and the abbreviated form. If so, then it is recognized in my journal abbreviation file. If not, one either needs to enter the correct abbreviated journal name in the Journal field or, alternatively, edit the journal abbreviation file.

To get started, here is a journal abbreviation file with a small list of common journals: In jabref go to Options>>Manage journal abbreviations and include in the personal journal list as an external file journal_abbreviations_general.txt.