Guide to Scientific WritingIntroduction
The introduction establishes the context for your study, and answers questions such as:
- What relevant past work has been done by other researchers on your topic?
- Why is the topic interesting?
- Why is it important to the rest of biology or the world at large?
- What issues have not been resolved by other researchers?
- What issues are researchers still arguing about?
- What question does your study seek to answer?
- How are you going to answer that question?
Components of a Good Introduction
A good introduction will start broad with general concepts then narrow down to the specific hypotheses tested by the study. Therefore it usually includes:
- A general context, providing background and importance. This is where you will typically need to cite previous literature. Click here if you need help finding appropriate references and choosing which ones that are best for your report.
- What is still unknown about your topic? This portion of your introduction often includes phrases like: “It remains unknown, however, …” or “Previous work has failed to …"
- A brief description of your system (e.g., the organisms or tools you are working with), and why it is appropriate for the questions you are addressing. Here you should only give as much detail as is necessary for someone unfamiliar with your experiment to understand the questions you are asking and the hypotheses/predictions you are making.
- The specific questions/hypotheses you will address (these should relate closely to what you said was still unknown about your topic). It is often good to indicate how your results will allow you to test the competing hypotheses or address the unknown knowledge. You should also state what results you expected before you did your experiment – these are your hypotheses or predictions.
Caution: Be careful not to plagiarize content from your textbook or other sources. Use your own words and cite everything! Remember, your goal is to summarize relevant findings from other sources, not to quote specific ideas or results.
Check out a dissected example of an Introduction