Final Report Guidelines
General Remarks
The final report should be no more than 50 pages long (not including references/bibliography lists or appendices). Fifty pages are the absolute maximum, and your report may end up being significantly shorter than this. It should be produced in a serif font, such as Times New Roman, size 12 and with single spacing. Pages should be numbered. References should be superscripted after any punctuation marks, for example.1 Be consistent in style. for referencing, e.g., F. Bloggs and B. Jones, Phys. Rev. Lett., 2001, 99, 157. [Authors, italic abbreviated journal name, year, bold volume, page number.] The report can be written in LaTeX, or MS Word.
Structure
The structure of the report will vary depending on the individual nature of each project. However, the report should include:
1) A title page. This should include the title of your project, your full name, the institution (in this case, UCL), and the degree for which the dissertation is submitted (MSc Scientific and Data Intensive Computing).
2) A declaration that the work is your own. For example, ‘I, full name, confirm that the work presented in this dissertation is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the dissertation.’
3) A link to your GitHub or similar repository with your code.
4) An abstract. This should be a concise summary of the project and the main results found. It should be no more than 300 words and located at the beginning of the report.
5) An introduction section. This should discuss the aims and objectives of the project, the rationale behind the project, and how it relates to previous work. It should provide sufficient background to put the project into the wider research field. The last paragraph of the introduction section should outline what is in the remaining sections of the report.
6) A concluding section. This should summarise the main results of the project and how these results meet the aims and objectives of the project.
It should discuss any future research that could follow on from the project. Students should discuss the structure of their report with their supervisors, who will be able to advise further on additional sections and subsections.
Optionally, your report can include:
1) Flow diagrams or pseudo-code blocks detailing the algorithms implemented as part of your project. Flow diagrams or pseudo-code blocks should be numbered, captioned, and referred to in the main body of the text. You may use a different monotype font for code blocks, such as Courier New.
2) Graphs and tables. These really help to visualise the main scientific results of your project. Again, any figures or tables should be numbered, captioned, and referred to in the main body of the text. Axes of graphs should be clearly labelled. All images should be of sufficient size that they are easily readable; as a guide, axes labels should appear to be the same size as the normal font size in the main body text.
3) Table of contents. This should be produced automatically from the section and subsections of the report.
Assessment
The project will be handed in via Turnitin. This is a sophisticated plagiarism detection system. The system has access to billions of resources worldwide (websites, journals, etc.) and access to work previously submitted to the Physics department and other departments across the university. You must write in your own words. Any text directly lifted from a source should be properly referenced in quotation marks. Further details about academic integrity and UCL’s plagiarism policy can be found at:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/exams-and-assessments/academic-integrity
The report will be due on Thursday, 21st August 2025, by 3pm (BST). You will need to submit an electronic copy of your report using the link on the Moodle page for PHAS0077. Late submissions will be penalised according to UCL regulations. Therefore, please ensure you have enough time to complete your work before the deadline. Details of penalties for late submission can be found at:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/academic-manual/chapters/chapter-4-assessment-framework-taught- programmes/section-3-module-assessment
Two independent markers will assess the final report (your first and second supervisors). It will be assessed for its originality, analysis and discussion of the results, the introductory content (including problem definition and references), its style (the structure, quality of the scientific English used, and clarity) and the overall presentation. Further details can be found in the mark schemes freely available on the Moodle webpage for PHAS0077.
You are strongly advised to complete a draft of the report well before the deadline. Give yourself plenty of time to proofread and make alterations. Run a spell checker!