Research Reports
Overview
Research teams are required to submit a research report approximately every other week, 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.
Target Audience
This document should make sense to a senior engineer at Cornell who is unconnected to AguaClara.
Expectations
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.
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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.
Formatting
Research reports will be written in Overleaf. The final submission at the end of the semester will be a PDF of the report and a zip file of the Overleaf Project uploaded to the subteam wiki page.
Starting with Overleaf - Zip Files:
Research Report Template - Use this template to build your reports
- Overleaf Training
Starting with Overleaf - Read Only Links:
These links are identical to the zip files above, but if you'd just like a reference to the original files without re-downloading the zip, use the links below. These read-only links do not give you access to the figures and bibliographies that would be in the Projects menu.
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The file name shall be "Report <team name> <semester> <year>". For example, the StaRS Filter Theory report name would be "Report StaRS Filter Theory Spring 2016"
If for some reason you need to switch to a new Overleaf document or the template changed significantly:
- Download the new template
- Upload the zip file to Overleaf and start the new report
- Copy and paste relevant source code from the old report to the new report (this keeps all comments)
All formatting should follow Grammar Guidelines for Reports.
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The following rubric breaks down how all reports are calculated. Your advisor will include this table and your team's score in each category for each report.
| Section | Percent |
|---|---|
Background and Abstract | 20% |
Methods | 25% |
Discussion | 20% |
Conclusions and Future Work | 10% |
Effort Toward Objectives | 10% |
Formatting | 5% |
Technical Writing | 10% |
| Total | 100% |