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Research Report Guidelines
For technical writing tips, please see Will's presentation on how to write reports!
Research teams are required to submit a research report approximately every month, or as noted on the syllabus. The exercise is not intended to add extra work, but rather facilitate a joint team effort of learning and reflection.
This document should make sense to a senior engineer at Cornell who is unconnected to AguaClara.
A research report is a written document that reflects the high level of effort and professionalism expected in the engineering profession. Spelling and grammatical errors should be eliminated. Your team is expected to follow the formatting guidelines dictated on this page and utilize your best judgment when writing these reports. Your reports should always have a designated Report Proofreader; this individual is responsible for ensuring that there are no spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors. Different individuals on your team can hold this role over the course of the semester, but be sure to note who holds that role in each report that you submit.
These reports should take significant effort, time and thought. Supporting data and/or code will be included int the report, and the report itself should be easily understood without having to look at the supporting documents.
The report should include the following sections with some flexibility based on the scope of your project:
- Abstract - Summarize the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions of your subteam. 100 words max.
- Introduction - Explain how your completion of your challenge will affect AguaClara and our mission of providing safe drinking water (or sustainable wastewater treatment!). If this is a continuing team, how will your contribution build upon previous research? What needs to be further discovered or defined? If this is a new team, what prompted the inclusion of this team?
- Literature Review - Discuss what is already known about your research area. Connect your objectives with what is already known and explain what additional contribution you intend to make.
- Previous Work - Discuss what is already known about your research area based on the work of AguaClara subteams. Connect your objectives with what past teams discovered and explain what additional contribution you intend to make. Make sure to add APA formatted in text citations.
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Methods - Explain the techniques you have used to acquire additional data and insights. The techniques should be described in sufficient detail so that another researcher could duplicate your work.
- Experimental Apparatus - Explain your apparatus setup using enough detail such that future teams can recreate your apparatus.
- Procedure - Discuss your experimental procedure to explain how you ran your experiment, what you were testing, and the values of relevant parameters.
- Results and Analysis - Connect your work to fundamental physics/chemistry/statics/fluid mechanics or whatever field is appropriate. Analyze your results and compare with theoretical expectations or if you have not yet done the experiments, describe your expectations based on established knowledge. Include implications of your results. How will your results influence the design of AguaClara plants? If possible provide clear recommendations for design changes that should be adopted.
- Conclusions - Explain what you have learned and how that influences your next steps. Make sure that you defend your conclusions. (this is conclusions, not opinions!)
- Future work - Describe your plan of action for the next several weeks of research.
- References - Cite all references your team used here.
- Manual - Provide all of the guidance that would be necessary for future teams to pick your work up where you left off.
It is too easy to create a report that is full of opinions and unsubstantiated conclusions. Defend your conclusions using your engineering skills. If you have an opinion (hypothesis) that you wish to include, explain how you will test your hypothesis.
Research reports will be written in Markdown.
All formatting should follow Grammar Guidelines for Reports.
Each report should include the team name, team member names, and date. You will also identify primary responsibilities/roles and who is fulfilling which role in these two weeks (i.e. data analysis, experimental operation). To help facilitate knowledge transfer and learning, these roles should rotate throughout the semester so that every person does not just have experience, but is competent with all aspects of team success.
The report must be a stand-alone document. Important equations must be documented and explained. Variables used in equations must also be labeled. Include visual figures of theoretical and experimental results whenever possible with accompanying explanations of how these are related to your research or design.
By the end of the night on Friday (by 11:59 PM), e-mail to the graders ([email protected]) and cc all of your group members with the github link to your report. Due dates for these reports can be found on the current semester syllabus. Late reports will be penalized 10% each day that they are not turned in.
See the rubric in your grading folder