Guidelines for Student Reports

One of the key skills being developed in an undergraduate or graduate degree is the ability to summarise and communicate complex ideas in a succinct and accessible way. This is tested several times during the Physics degree course here at Leicester, and common mistakes can lead to lost marks. Here's a list of my own personal preferences for reviews and reports, in case they're of use to the wider community - do check the specific guidelines for your reports carefully though!

• Three Ts: Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; then tell them what you’ve told them. Repetition of key points helps to reinforce them. You’re telling a story.

• Introduce a Central Theme: Use the introduction to define a central question or thesis that your review will address, and keep referring back to this in each Section and in the Conclusion. That way, the reader will understand how each particular section fits into the wider study. It's sometimes helpful to set up a theory/idea/concept that you're seeking to test with your work, whether to confirm or refute, and then to refer back to that in the conclusions (and maybe also the abstract).

• Summarise sections: At the end of a section, before moving on, try to include a few sentences/statements to say where we are in the review – what is the take-home message of the previous section, and what are we going to look at next? This helps to avoid abrupt transitions between sections.

• Numbered Sections: Use numbered sections and subsections to break up large sections of text, and to make it easy to refer both forwards and backwards to different sections (signposting).

• Structure: There's no need to stick to a rigid separation of methods/results/discussion. A common mistake is presenting the results and then discussing their meaning later (by which time the reader has forgotten), so try to keep these together - it'll help the narrative flow. So if you had three tasks, explain the common methodology first, then explain the method/results/discussion for task 1, then task 2, etc., with a final discussion section to pull together common threads from the tasks.

• Figures: Make sure that figures are referred to in the main text, so that the reader knows when they should be looking at a particular chart, table, or diagram. Your axes should be labelled, the font should be large enough to be readable, and the plot should have a title. If there are multiple sub-panels, level them (a), (b), (c) etc. to refer to theme in the text. Ensure figures have a sufficient size to be useful and readable.

• Figure/Table captions: Ensure that the caption contains sufficient information to explain what the reader is seeing, and contains either a source (Author et al, yyyy) or a web URL for the origin - don't skimp on the caption, as the busy reader will often look at those first to get a general overview.

• References: Avoid references to ‘NASA’, ‘ESA’, ‘Met Office’, etc. – if the information came from a weblink without a distinct author/year, use a footnote to provide the url instead. If the information came from a primary source, use the ‘Author et al., (yyyy)’ Harvard format and include in your bibliography. We don't tend to see many direct quotes from previous studies in research papers, but sometimes they're useful to make a point in your narrative. And if you are going to use Wikipedia, try to track down the original sources!

• Text boxes: Sometimes definitions or brief digressions are required in a review, so make use of text boxes (placed in the document like figures and referred to in the main text) rather than breaking up the flow of the report.

• Columns: The use of two columns helps to break up large blocks of text and is easier on the eye.

• Conclusions: Don't skimp on these, they're a really helpful summary. A bulleted/numbered list of your key conclusions is often helpful.

• Author contributions: Sometimes you'll have been working as part of a team, so be very clear - preferably right at the start - about which components of the project are your own work, and which were contributed by your partners.

• Keep to the point: Don’t be tempted to go off topic or to introduce information that isn’t relevant to the central theme of the project – this can just lead to confusion and dilutes your take-home messages.

• Proof-read: Read it over and over again, even out loud, to make sure that the sentences flow together and make the points you’re intending. It helps to reserve the final 24 hours before submission to do this sort of final read-through, to ensure it all hangs together and there are no silly typos.

• Equations: Make sure that you define every single one of the parameters in an equation, and it helps to explain in words what the equation is showing (e.g., as I increase this, I'd expect a decrease in that...). Number your equations for cross-referencing.

• Uncertainties: Add error bars everywhere you can - especially in the abstract and conclusion where you might be stating your "final answers" for the quantities you've derived. Summarise in words all the potential contributions to the uncertainties. Keep the number of decimal places or significant figures to a minimum, depending on the uncertainties in your experiment.

• Latex: Writing in Latex is not as scary as it sounds and can be helpful for reference management, so here's a Latex Template in Overleaf kindly prepared by my students in the past.