Lab Report Analysis

A lab report is a document whose purpose is to describe the procedure of a performed lab experiment and its results. Lab reports help communicate the ideas, observations, and results come from such experiments to others. By writing lab reports you are sharing ideas and findings based on your experiment that can help and contribute to the scientific community in the search of solutions and answers to different problems and questions. Lab reports usually contained eight basic elements which are the title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and references. The scientific lab reports that will be analyze further will be “General practitioner’s perceptions of the tolerability of antidepressants drugs: a comparison of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants” by Richard M Martin, Sean R Hilton, Sally M Kerry and Nicky M Richards and “The Effects of Music Intervention on functional connectivity Strength of the Brain in Schizophrenia” by Mi Yang, Hui He, Mingjun Duan , Xi Chen, Xin Chang, Yongxiu Lai, Jianfu Li, Cheng Luo, and Dezhong Yao. The first lab report is about an experiment performed with the purpose of comparing serotonin reuptake inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants. The second lab report is based on an experiment to test the intervention of music as a treatment for schizophrenia. Despite these lab reports are about two completely different experiments on completely different things they follow the eight basic elements of format for a lab report and overall seem complete.

The first thing that a lab report must have is an informative title. An informative title gives the reader a quick easy glimpse of what the lab report will be about and helps the reader know whether or not they will be interested in the topic. For the first lab report, “General Practitioners’ Perceptions of The Tolerability of Antidepressant Drugs: A Comparison of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Tricyclic Antidepressants”, the title tells the reader immediately what the report is going to be about. It contains the main key words that are going to appear throughout the lab and is very specific. However, for the second lab report, “The Effects of Music Intervention on Functional Connectivity Strength of the Brain in Schizophrenia”, the title is slightly shorter than the first lab report, nevertheless, this does not make the title any less informative. This title is also pretty straight forward about what its experiment is going to be based on and it contains the main key words that will be read the most throughout the whole report. One of the most important things a title in a lab report must accomplish is being informative and both titles for both lab reports seem to successfully accomplish this.

After the title, the second part of a lab report is an abstract. Abstracts are another element besides the title that offers the reader a quick overall look into what the lab report is going to be on. The abstract of the first lab report contains seven specific parts which are the objective, design, setting, subjects, main outcome measures, results, and conclusions. Each of these small parts contains one to two sentences explaining and summarizing. They are not very detailed, which is good because an abstract is not supposed to be very detailed, but they tell the reader just enough about the purpose of the experiment, its design, setting, subjects, most important outcomes, the results, and conclusion. The second lab report did not have any parts in its structure, nor it states explicitly and separately in a small summary of one to three sentences each part of the overall lab report. Also, it does not explicitly state that the first part of the lab report is the abstract. You can tell the abstract by reading it and making sure it summarizes the different parts of the overall report, it just does not do it in an obvious way. However, it does summarize each part of the lab report as a whole in one to three sentences each. Both abstracts seem complete overall, however they are a bit different while the first report’s abstract has a heading that clearly states is the abstract and its divided into seven different sections, the second one is just one paragraph with no heading. Therefore, the first lab report abstract seems to be the most organized and clear. After the abstract comes the introduction. The introduction is the part of the lab report in which you introduce your work. For the first lab report the introduction shows a little of background information on serotonin and antidepressants and it gives a little bit of statistical information between the use of each drug to then lead to then state at the end overall what was done for the experiment. It does not state their goal or hypothesis clearly. The second lab report introduction starts by giving background information on schizophrenia. It then proceeds to give statements on music intervention to then later mentions their study and other studies to lastly clearly state the goal of their study. The second lab report has a more complete introduction than the first lab report.

Next, after the introduction we have the methods and materials used for the lab report. For the first lab report the heading instead of methods and materials it says, “subjects and methods”.  In this report the methods and materials sections after it briefly describes their study and how it was performed, it was divided into two sections which are “selection of general practitioners” and “analysis of new data”. The first section goes more in detail on how the subjects for their study were chosen and reported and the second section elaborates more on how the data for this study was analyzed and how it was collected. It also contains a table, “Table 1”, with the percentage of general practitioners in different regions at the end of the section. For the second lab report its heading clearly says, “materials and methods”. This lab report contains a longer methods and material section that is divided into nine parts and these nine parts are label as: Subjects, design, “Content of Music Intervention”, “Psychiatric and Neuropsychological Assessment”, data acquisition, “Functional Connectivity Strength Analysis”, “Functional Connectivity Analysis”, “statistical analysis”, and “The Relationship between FC and Patients’ Variables”. The subject part talks about its participants in the study and the design explains how the effects of music intervention were measured. “Content of Music Intervention” explains how the music intervention was performed and data acquisition explains how the data was collected. The rest of the parts of these sections then go into explaining more specifically how each type of different data was analyzed. However, “Statistical analysis” is divided into three parts to talk about the different types of statistical data that were collected and analysed in this study. The methods and materials section of the second lab was longer than the one of the first possibly because the study performed here was more complicated than that of the first lab report.

Further we have the results section of which explain and analyze the results obtained from the experiment or study in a lab report. For the first lab report the results section contains three different tables which are named as “Table 2”, “Table 3” and “Table 4”. The first table is about the antidepressants, the second one is about the serotonin reuptake inhibitors and the last table is about both of them. This section of the first lab report goes back and forth explaining and pointing out the data from the tables and comparing results. For the second lab report, the results section is divided into six parts; “Participant Demographic Information”, “Changes in Psychiatric Symptoms and Neuropsychological Measurements”, “The Abnormalities of FCS at Baseline”, “Longitudinal Changes of FCS after Music Intervention in Schizophrenia”, “Longitudinal Changes of FC after Music Intervention in Schizophrenia”, and “The Relationship between Altered FC and Patients’ Variables”. This section of the second lab report also contains one figure, “Figure 1”, on neural plasticity of the brain and one table, “Table 1”, on music intervention and the interaction of the brain. Both lab reports had similar lengths, however, the first lab report contained more tables.

The next section is the discussion. The first lab report contains six different parts inside the discussion section which are “Definition of discontinuation ratio”, “comparison with other studies”, “Cost effectiveness considerations”, “Adverse effects as reasons for discontinuation”, “Potential confounding factors”, and “conclusions”. This section of the first lab report contains two tables; “Table 5” and “Table 6”. The second lab report discussion section does not divide into different parts, nevertheless, it does contain one table, “Table 2”, along with three; “Figure 2”, “Figure 3” and “Figure 4”. The first figure is on neural plasticity and the last two are graphs. While the first lab report contained its conclusion inside the discussion question, the second lab report has it as a separate section after the discussion section. It is very short with only one paragraph and brief summary on everything. To add on, the second lab report also contains five extra short sections after the conclusion. These are labeled as “Ethical Approval”, “Conflicts of Interest”, “Authors’ Contributions”, “Acknowledgments”, and “Supplementary Materials”. Last but not least important is the references sections of the lab reports. The references section of a lab report list all the references of sources that you cite throughout your lab report. Both lab reports contained references sections and listing all the sources that were cited throughout the reports.

Both lab reports analysed seem to be very complete overall with all of their basic eight elements. While the second lab report might seem more complete, “The Effects of Music Intervention on functional connectivity Strength of the Brain in Schizophrenia”, than the first lab report, “General practitioner’s perceptions of the tolerability of antidepressants drugs: a comparison of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants”, due to the extra sections and parts that it contains that is because the study performed for this lab might have been more complicated with more things to take into account.

References

Yang, M., He, H., Duan, M., Chen, X., Chang, X., Lai, Y., Li, J., Liu, T., Luo, C., & Yao,

10. (2018). The Effects of Music Intervention on Functional Connectivity Strength of the Brain in Schizophrenia. Neural Plasticity, 1–10. https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1155/2018/2821832

Martin, R., Hilton, S., Kerry, S., & Richards, N. (1997). General Practitioners’ Perceptions of the

Tolerability of Antidepressant Drugs: A Comparison of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Tricyclic Antidepressants. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 314(7081), 646-651. Retrieved October 13, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25173922