Date
12 January 2016
From
Diego Porras
Third/Fourth Year Project Organiser,
Department of Physics and Astronomy
T +44 (0) 1273 877681
To
All Final Year Students
cc
Project Supervisors – For Information
Memorandum
Final Year Projects – Notes for Authors
This is to remind you that a written report, or dissertation, on your project must be
submitted, and to give you some guidance on how to prepare it.
1. Submission. The deadline for submission of the report – IN PDF FORMAT ON
STUDY DIRECT, AND TWO HARD COPIES - to the School Office, Pev 2, 3A20 :
ALL FINAL YEAR STUDENTS: by 16:00 on Wednesday, 11 May 2016.
Failure of Word Processor package or disc or printer is not an acceptable reason for
late submission.
A draft of your dissertation should be submitted to your supervisor at least
three weeks before the deadline and will be returned to you within one week
with any comments.
2. Project Reports are not returned to you. If you wish to have a copy for yourself,
please make this before the deadline.
3. Length. This depends somewhat on the project, but 3,000 - 8,000 words will suffice
in most cases. Survey reports, or reports on projects which have required extensive
reviews of the literature, will usually be longer than reports of a mathematical or
experimental nature. A balanced presentation is more important than the precise
length, but the length must not exceed 20,000 words. Examiners reserve the right to
ignore any report beyond this word limit and are likely to mark overlong reports down
on presentation. Large compilations of data sets or program listings should appear in
Appendices if at all.
4. You can assume that your reader has the same general background knowledge of
physics (but not necessarily of astronomy) as one of your fellow-students who is
doing a different project. You then need to put in enough specific background
information in your Introduction to enable such a student to understand what your
project is about.
5. Layout. This should be as follows:
(a) Abstract
(b) Preface
(c) Table of Contents (with page numbers)
(c) Main Text
(d) Acknowledgements
(e) Appendices
(f) References and Bibliography.
Preface: The purpose of this is for you to state explicitly the extent to which your
dissertation relies on the work of others, and highlight the portion that you claim to be
your own original work. For example: you might say: “The results of chapter 3 rely
upon a simulation provided by the research group. The analysis of the data is entirely
my own work. I carried out the analytical calculation of chapter 4 in conjunction with
my supervisor…” and so on. Without this statement, it will be assumed that no work
is original and that your thesis is a review article. If you merely claim that the thesis is
all your own work, you should be aware that any evidence to the contrary may leave
you susceptible to charges of plagiarism.
Diagrams and short tables should be included in the text, but extensive tabular matter
should be placed in Appendices, as should detailed calculations not required for the
immediate understanding of the text.
References and Bibliography: Wherever possible, references should be specific
and to the primary published source material, i.e. to a journal article or conference
proceedings or to a book, and not to a web page containing reference to the primary
source. (The reasons for this should be obvious – web pages often have a limited
lifetime. In addition, web material is not subject to any quality control in the form of
peer review.)
Reference Style: This should follow either the "Harvard" style or be numbered strictly
in the order in which they appear in the text. In the former, reference is made in the
text by giving the name of the author and the year of publication in parentheses e.g.
"...the large polarization (Moffat 1971a) is accounted for...." or "....Jones (1990) found
that....". In the case of more than two authors, use the form "....Budd et al (1971)....."
At the end of the text, the references should be listed in alphabetical order of the first
author (and chronological order for several papers by one author). All authors of a
paper should be given in this listing. The style should be:
Budd W F, Jones M and Radol C, 1971 Rep Prog Phys, 31 1-70.
Moffat, P.H., 1971a Mon Not R Astr Soc, 153 401-418.
If you use reference numbers, this should appear in the text either as a superscript,
Budd et al27, or in square brackets, Moffat [32]. Some word-processing or editing
packages (e.g. Word and Latex) will take care of the numbering for you. Without
such a tool, renumbering the references each time you modify the text becomes
difficult and it is hence often easier to use the Harvard style.
Books read as general background and not specifically referred to in the text should
be listed in a General Bibliography, in alphabetical order of authors.
6. Main Text The order and titles of the sections in this will, in most cases, follow
broadly the typical pattern of a substantial paper in a journal or of a DPhil thesis.
You should consult with your supervisor about the precise layout most
relevant to your project. Such a consultation will be most profitable if you present
your supervisor with an initial draft list of the section headings you think you should
use. (An informal guide to writing a project report is appended to these instructions.)
7. Format. The paper should be A4 (297 mm x 210 mm) and the text should be typed
or written legibly. If it is typed, plain paper should be used and the spacing can be
single. If the report is handwritten, the text should be on paper with widely spaced
lines. The report can be printed double sided.
8. Binding. The title of the Project, the candidate number, the name of the supervisor
and the date should be typed on the front cover. Your name should not appear in
any form in the dissertation.
9. Plagiarism. Your attention is drawn to Section 2.9 of the Examination and
Assessment Regulations Handbook 2015/16 and particularly to the paragraph on
plagiarism. If you directly quote the writings of other people in your dissertation, or
use figures and/or tables from published sources, you must acknowledge this
specifically in the text.
10. Weighting. The assessment weights of the talk and the report are given below:
BSc and MPhys Project: Report 80%, Presentation 20%
Q Project: Two Reports 43% each, Presentation 14%
It is extremely unwise, therefore, to fail to submit a Project Report. The overall
quality of the project is one of the main considerations used to distinguish between
classes of degrees for borderline cases: the reports are made available to the Exam
Board and to the External Examiners. Astrophysics Projects carry the same
weighting as do Physics Projects.
Project Marking
When writing your project reports, you may find it helpful to take into account the
following guidelines which will be used by supervisors and other markers of the report.
Supervisors give consideration to two separate factors in their marking of projects: (i)
Originality and Achievement, and (ii) Project Report. The overall percentage reflects
both these factors.
The writing up of a project is a test of the student’s ability to communicate scientific
ideas and experimental work and/or mathematics to a fellow physicist. The dissertation
should explain why the topic of the project is important, what the purpose of the project
is, and how the student carried it out. It should conclude by summarising the results
obtained and by commenting on their significance. If the project contains no original
work, but is a review of existing literature, this should be made clear from the outset. In
all cases proper references should be given in the text together with a list of sources
and a general bibliography at the end.
The marking guidelines can be found on the Study Direct site.