Physics report
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Detailed Guidelines for Final Project Report The written report is to be typed using a 12-‐point font; the pages should be numbered and have 1-‐inch margins on all sides. The text in the abstract should be single-‐spaced; all other text in the report must be double-‐spaced. Proper English should be used throughout the report–any spelling and grammatical errors or poorly worded or organized text will be reflected in your report grade. All equations, graphs, charts, etc. should be produced clearly on a computer. While the ideas in the reports may be the result of numerous discussions among the group members, the actual organization and writing in the submitted report must be the work of solely the person submitting the report (this part of the project is not a group effort!). Any sign of plagiarism in your report will be treated accordingly–meaning that you will be very lucky to get any credit at all for the submitted report. See the section below, Some Important Notes about Plagiarism. Format Each report must be broken down into the following sections, each of which (except the title page) must be clearly labeled at the top of a new page. (Your report grade will also reflect the extent to which you properly follow these guidelines.) Title Page (Do not put “Title Page” on the title page) This should be the cover page for the report. Please do not make up a cover page in addition to this one. This page should include the title of the report, your name, the date, the course and section number, the name of your instructor, the names of your fellow group members, the name of the group leader, and an abstract for the report. The abstract is a very concise overview of what you did. The specific purpose or objective of the study should be clearly stated in the abstract. The abstract should be no more than about 10 sentences long; it should be single-‐spaced. There should be no references in the abstract. Introduction and Background A motivation and background for the study should be provided. The background may be of an historical nature, overviewing various stages of work that led up to the results being reported on in this study. (This is not an overview of the work that your group performed, but rather an overview of work that was performed by various scientists in the development of the topic you are investigating.) It is not a bad idea to incorporate at the end of the Introduction and Background a list of the physics topics that you will be addressing later in the report. This can help lend a flow to the paper that can improve its readability. This section should also include a clear statement of the purpose of your investigation. Also be sure to use reference numbers to cite references in this section. Note that the reference numbers must appear in order (1, 2, 3,. . . ) when referring to references listed in the References section. (See the discussion of the References section below for more information on listing and citing references.) Procedure The procedure section should provide a detailed account of what was actually done in the investigation. Include a discussion of the measurements you decided to make, how things went,
additional measurements you decided to make or remake and why, etc. Your discussion should cover any difficulties that were encountered along with how you dealt with them. Neat and clearly labeled figures of the experimental set-‐up must be included in this section. In general, your procedure section should provide enough detail for you or someone else to go back and reproduce what you did. Data and Analysis The data and analysis section is where your experimental data are presented and where the details of the related physics are worked out and explained. In particular, this section should start off with a discussion of your data and include neat, clearly presented tables of your data along with appropriate units and uncertainties. Remember to assign a symbol to your data so that it can be used in equations when doing the analysis portion of this section. The data should be followed by a discussion of how you analyzed your data. This discussion should cover whatever techniques (mathematical, graphical) were applied in order to extract information from your experimental data about the physical system being studied, along with any sample calculations that might make the discussion more complete and easily understood. Diagrams, equations, derivations, charts, graphs, etc., should be contained in this section. This is where you get to show off the relevant physics that you have incorporated into your study or into your understanding of the conclusion of this study. Sample calculations at the level of example or homework-‐problem solutions in this class must be incorporated into your report at this point. The calculations should be relevant to the discussion of your analysis and provide insight into the application of the physics to the topic under investigation. Note that this section should only contain raw data (in tabular or graphical form) and a discussion of the calculations being done–that is, a discussion of how the results are going to be computed. The results of the calculations and any graphs and discussion of these calculated results should be contained in the next section (Results). Results As just mentioned, the previous section discussed what data were taken and what calculations were being performed, along with how or why they were performed or worked out. This section should present and discuss what came out of that work. Your results should be presented in a clear format, and should include any graphs of calculated results that show behaviors of the data that will be a part of your conclusions. (Don’t forget uncertainties with your calculated results and error bars on your graphs.) Your discussion should include the significance of the results that you obtained. Conclusions A good bit of this section can repeat information given in previous sections. For example, you can start off this section with a very brief overview of the problem or phenomenon being studied (this may repeat some of the ideas that were presented in the Introduction and Background). What was the purpose or hypothesis of this study? Then go on to summarize what was found–what were the basic results and conclusions that you drew from them? How did your thinking about the subject change? Were your original ideas or hypotheses correct? If not, why do you think they weren’t? What are your thoughts about the future of this subject or directions that research in this area may be heading? What suggestions do you have for others who might want to go on and study this topic further? This section should tie together the purpose of the project, the results you obtained, and the conclusions drawn from those results into a neat package. References You must have at least three official references other than the course lecture notes and activity manual for this report, although the course lecture notes may be given as an additional reference; it would not be unreasonable to have significantly more than five references total. Official
references are references from texts, professional journals, web sites from government agencies, research institutes, or accredited colleges and universities, etc. You should not use any references in the abstract. Note that sources such as Wikipedia are not acceptable reference websites since they are not websites associated with an official scientific source. You may wonder why we ask you to do this. We want you to go beyond your coursework in your project. Did you study collisions? Then you might want to learn something about a quantity called the coefficient of restitution. Rotational motion? You might want to understand why the rotational inertia is what it is for certain objects. Free fall? You may want to learn something about drag forces and buoyant forces. Your references must be listed using the following formats that are used in some physics journals (watch out for parentheses and italicized or bolded words): Book:
Author(s), Title (Publisher, City, year) pages (if appropriate) Example: S. Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology (Wiley, New York, 1972) pp. 36-‐39 Journal or
Newspaper Article: Author(s), “Title of Article,” Name of Journal volume number (year) pages Example: N. D. Mermin, “Relativity without light,” American Journal of Physics 52 (1984) 119–
124 Web Site:
Author(s) and/or Affiliation, “Title of Page”, URL (date site was last revised, if available) Example: Alexander Smits, Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton
University, “Aerodynamicsof Bicycles”, www.princeton.edu/~asmits/Bicycle_web/bicycle_aero.html
Note: A web-‐site reference is not valid without an official affiliation (university, national lab or scientific organization, etc.). An individual’s personal (not institute or university affiliated) web site or a source of information such as Wikipedia are not acceptable references for a scientific report.
Your list of references must be numbered in the order in which they are referred to in the text, and they must always be cited within the text of the written report when appropriate using either a superscripted reference number or the reference number in square brackets. The following two examples show these two methods in which the sentence refers to reference number 8 in the list of references in the References section of the report. You may use whichever method you prefer.
The first use of such a technique occurred in 1879 and was immediately declared a huge success.8 The first use of such a technique occurred in 1879 and was immediately declared a huge success.[8]
The References section at the end of your paper must then contain a list of your references used within the text of your report, listed by number in numerical order. (Number 1 in the list should be the reference encountered first when reading your report, etc.) You should avoid using quotes in your formal report–put things in your own words.
Some Important Notes about Plagiarism Please note that you are expected to turn in a signed copy of the Honor Statement on the D2L page for PHYS 2011 affirming that you have not plagiarized and that you understand the penalty for plagiarism.
More than a very few words (two or three!) copied from a source without properly referencing that source is called plagiarism. You can get a zero on your report, an F in the course, and/or be expelled from the university if found guilty of plagiarism. (See your Student Handbook for details.) Don’t take a chance! Get information from your sources and then paraphrase what you’ve read by putting the ideas together in your own words. If you really want to use the exact words from your source, then put them in quotes and reference them, but this practice should be avoided if at all possible– you should rarely if ever quote! Saying in your report that you can’t put it better than this reference, and then using a quote is just bad practice and lazy writing. Paraphrase!–Put things in your own words!
The following quote was taken from the online source www.principalinvestigators.org/newsDetail. php?No.-‐19-‐Intellectual-‐Property-‐Dividing-‐Line-‐Between-‐Fair-‐Use-‐and-‐Plagiarism-‐23 (No. 19: Intellectual Property: Dividing Line Between “Fair Use” and Plagiarism?, by Anonymous) and discusses the relationship between citing and paraphrasing:
“Simply citing a source says to the reader ’these are not my ideas’. It also says ’these are my words’. Simply omitting words here, using synonyms there is not adequate paraphrasing. To do this properly and to show you really understand what the author has written, write without looking at the original and write as if you are describing this to a friend, albeit a science one. Proper paraphrasing does not include a sentence for everyone written. Obviously technical words will be used in the paraphrase (RT-‐PCR etc), but the rest need to be your own words. Learning to write is not done by simply cutting and pasting... it’s hard work and one struggles but that’s how you learn to do it.”
A Checklist of Items for the Preparation of your Formal Report 1. The writing and detailed organization of the report must be the result of your work and your
work alone. 2. The title page must be the top page of the report. 3. All pages should have one-‐inch margins on all sides, and, with the exception of the title page,
should be numbered. 4. The abstract must be single-‐spaced; all other pages must be double-‐spaced. 5. Each new section must start a new page and have the section heading at the top of the page
(except for the title page–it should not have a heading that says “Title Page”). 6. Figures (which includes graphs) in your report should be numbered so that you can refer to
them in the text of your report. For example: “As can be seen in the graph of Fig. 3, the data do not display a linear behavior.” Each individual student must produce his or her own graphs and figures. Figures should contain any labels that would be appropriate for your discussion (for example, label the height H and the speed v of the ball as it rolls off of the table top. . . ) and graphs should have appropriate axis labels and titles. The figure label (“Fig. 3”) should appear under the figure or graph along with a caption, if appropriate.
7. When writing something in your report for which you have a reference, use a reference number as demonstrated in the References section above. The references in your References section must then be listed by number in the order in which they are referred to in the text of your report (starting with number 1). (Your Introduction and Background section will most likely be the section containing the most references.) Not properly listing references or citing them
within your text is one of the most common reasons students lose points on their report. 8. The final report will be submitted and returned to you via the D2L dropbox. If at all possible,
please submit your report in Microsoft Word format. If this is not possible, your report should be in pdf format.
9. You should work hard in producing this report, and you should take pride in that work. The appearance of your report should reflect this pride–it should be neat and orderly. Note that this project grade counts a good bit toward your final course grade, and that the written report contributes the majority of credit (55%) toward your total project grade (the oral presentation contributes 35% while your project proposal grade is 10%). This should make it well worth your time to do a good and thorough job in writing this report.
10. Don’t forget the physics! It may be tempting to just describe your topic using physics words and to just present your data. This is not sufficient! Your project report should reflect the level of sophistication of the course lecture material, which means that it must include some quantitative or mathematical work at the level of the lecture examples, homework problems, and activities, as well as a discussion of the concepts from the course that are needed to understand your data and the interpretation of the results.
11. Your writing should be clear, concise and correct. Use a spell-‐checker to look for spelling mistakes. Carefully proofread (or get a friend to proofread) the report to make sure that the correctly spelled words are the words you meant to put into the report. (“All energy want directly into the absorbing medium, at desired.” contains words spelled correctly. However “want” should be replaced by “went”, and “at” should be “as”–a spell-‐checker will not catch these mistakes. I once read a paper (not for physics) that was supposed to be about the dangers associated with the rupture of breast implants. Throughout the paper, the author had inadvertently used “rapture” instead of “rupture”. I had a good laugh, but the author did not get a good grade.
12. Have a friend read your report for clarity and organization. Does the report flow and make sense?
13. Before you submit your report, make sure that it really is the report that you intend to submit – not a copy of someone else’s report, not a report that you wrote for another class, not some random document that you downloaded from the internet. You will be graded on the basis of the document you submit even if it is not what you intended.
This document was originally written by Dr. V. J. Montemayor. It has been slightly revised by Dr. Martha R. Weller.
