How To Write Biology Dissertations
A good Biology dissertation on the surface has the basic structure of an essay, but it is in fact a detailed piece of work that represents a biological investigation.
General Rules You Should Follow to Produce a Well Written Biology Dissertation
- Decide on a clear question/s or hypothesis that the dissertation will answer and whether it will be laboratory or literature based.
- Include a review of the literature and research on your chosen hypothesis in your dissertation.
- Include the methods that you used to test your hypothesis or answer the question.
- Present and discuss your findings.
- Relate your findings to the original hypothesis or question.
- Make your opinions based on sources and facts.
- All arguments must be backed up with your own findings or cited using external sources.
- Be orderly and logical: make sure that the document is clear and readable.
- The dissertation should be written in a formal manner, with correct English grammar and spelling.
The General Layout of a Biology Dissertation
All Scientific dissertations whether they are laboratory or literature based, have a very similar structure:
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures and/or Abbreviations
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Materials and Methods
- Results
- Discussion and Further Work
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
Abstract
Abstracts usually have the same format in Biology dissertations. Your aim is to orientate the reader within the dissertation:
- The abstract contains a brief overview of the entire dissertation.
- It consists of a brief background of the topic, aims and objectives, methods and results.
- It should not be longer than 250 words.
- It is a single paragraph.
- No references are cited here.
Introduction
Your introduction section should specify the hypotheses and/or questions to be answered during the course of your research for the dissertation. It is similar whether you select literature or laboratory based dissertations.
Your aim is to begin with a brief background review of the research surrounding the title and hypotheses. You should describe the literature review surrounding the title next, highlighting the current research carried out in the field. Your questions and hypotheses follow on next, which should be explained using previously published work to reinforce the reason why you chose to research them.
Materials and Methods
The key to an efficient materials and methods section, with regards to laboratory based dissertations, is to describe the experiments in such a manner, that the reader is able to replicate them.
If your dissertation is literature based the methods described in the literature should be mentioned in your methods section. Conflicting methods should briefly be mentioned and the most commonly used ones should be described in detail. The way in which you conducted your literature based research should also be referred to.
If your dissertation involves collecting data (for laboratory and literature based dissertations), you will be required to describe how this was carried out, as well as how the data was recorded.
Results
In this section the data you have obtained, whether it be from literary sources or experimentation, should be interpreted. In each subsection, you should explain briefly the question you were trying to answer, what you did to answer it (methods) and what result you obtained.
The key points you should remember for a well written results section are:
- Each subsection should correspond to a particular experiment.
- The experiment in each subsection should be briefly described.
- Data should be presented as clearly as possible.
- For repeat experiments the averages should be documented.
- Make full use of tables and various forms of graphs.
- Numeric data should be put in the correct format for simple analysis.
- The results obtained should be interpreted in a simple concise manner – patterns or trends should be pointed out.
Discussion
Your objectives of the discussion are as follows:
- To discuss each result briefly.
- To connect each result obtained with the hypotheses and questions that were referred to in the introduction.
- Were the hypotheses correct?
- Were your questions answered?
- To explain any anomalies in the data you gathered.
- To connect the results obtained with other relevant published works.
- Was your data consistent with that of the relevant works published on the subject? If not, why not?
- What are the implications, if any, in the field of work your study was based on?
In order to guarantee a well written Biology dissertation you need to ensure that you select your topic of study carefully. It should be both interesting and engaging. The selection of your supervisor is also of importance.
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