Computer Science Project, Project Masters M60, Project Masters M40 Pages Structuring a Project Report!
Structuring a Project Report
This week's lecture is about how to structure your reports. The report is a really really cri!cal component of your project and it's not something
to be rushed 'at the end'
Word limits
There are two word limits for your reports:
40-credit projects, 10,000 words
60-credit projects, 15,000 words
The front-ma"er of your projects (!tle page, table of contents, figures, tables, abstract) do not count toward these limits. Tables in the body do
not count toward the limit. Acknowledgements, references and appendices also do not count toward the word limit.
These are based on very generous extrapola!on from submissions from last year. These are word limits and not word targets. Most projects
should not need to approach these limits. It is cri!cally important that you do not treat these as a target and try and 'fill space' in your report.
The likely outcome of doing so is reducing the overall quality of your project. Adding extra stuff just to fill the space is likely to cause your
examiner to ques!on whether the good stuff you've done is a reflec!on of your skills and knowledge or if you were just guessing correctly for
that bit.
The word limits are designed to recognise that students are doing a variety of projects, some of which may have substan!al prose components
to them. Many of your projects can be wri"en up to a very high standard using half the limit. Ultra-short reports are unlikely to fare well
because they are likely to omit important informa!on. Once you have communicated what you need to your focus, if anything, should be on
refining your report, itera!ng to remove extraneous aspects that do not improve it. Ask yourself when you read a paragraph "what 'work' is
this paragraph doing here?" If you're not sure what it's suppose to convey to the reader, what it's trying to help the reader conclude, think
about whether you really need it!
Penal!es
The penal!es for exceeding the word limits are as follows:
Up to 10% over-length: -5%
Up to 20% over-length: -10%
Up to 30% over-length: -20%
More than 30% over-length: project capped at 50%
The early parts of your report
The front part of your report should comprise a !tle page, tables of content, figures, tables (if appropriate), an abstract and an introduc!on.
The abstract should, in 200-300 words, explain to the reader what 'problem' you have iden!fied, the approach you took to solving this
problem and what it produced, and evalua!on of your efforts and some kind of conclusion about what all this means. Normally you're going to
be limited to a few sentences on each. You don't need to convey everything in the abstract; focus on the high-level things. The abstract is
almost a self-contained document of its own; it should be interpretable without the rest of the report.
A$er the abstract is the Introduc!on. In the introduc!on you're going to describe the general domain that your project is about, what the
problems in this area are and why these problems are worth solving. You should remember with your report that your 2nd marker may not be a
domain expert. Make sure that your introduc!on is accessible to someone who may not be an expert on this par!cular topic. You're trying to
convince them that the area you're focusing on is an area that is worth spending !me on while at the same !me helping them understand the
cri!cal issues in the area. Do not launch straight into detailed technical statements about what you did in the project; look at the papers you've
read. All of them will have at least some general introduc!on to the problem, even if it's fairly narrow. You have to give the reader an idea of
this before you can explain the details of your approach to them.
The main body of your report
First, you'll have your literature review. We've already covered what should go in here. You're trying to assess what other people have tried to
do in order to solve the kind of problem that you're addressing. This means you can learn from their efforts and use their findings to shape the
decisions you make in the rest of the report.
Next is the method/approach/specifica!on. Here you are describing what you did and why you did it. The name of this sec!on might vary with
the kind of project you're doing, but the goal is the same; to communicate the substance of the work you've done and the choices you've made
along the way. A"en!on to detail, being careful to report precisely what you've done, is important here.
Then in the evalua!on/results sec!on you're going to report what you found. Did the thing you build work? What worked, what didn't? How
did you test it? If you conducted a study with human par!cipants then this is where you report the results of the study. If you are doing a more
formal project, this is where you might evaluate the scope and exactness of your approach. The cri!cal thing here is that you report whether
you found/built what you expected to, how well things went and what didn't happen/work and why.
The final part of the main body is the discussion. This is a summary of what you found, contextualised by prior work (i.e., you might cite
literature from the literature review again here) and any learnings along the way. You might end this sec!on by explaining future work that
could be done if you had more !me. This is especially valuable if you run short of !me – you can s!ll explain what you would've done with
more !me and this lets you demonstrate more knowledge and understanding to your examiners.
The end part of your report
The end of the report comprises the conclusion, references and appendices. The conclusion is about wrapping everything up in a neat package
using a retrospec!ve tone; you're reminding the reader what you set out to find, what you did, what you found and what it means. The
conclusion needn't be long, but it does need to cover the important aspects of what you did and found. You might also finish the conclusion
with some brief forward looking comments about next steps.
References should be managed using a cita!on manager wherever possible. There is no preferred cita!on format, just choose one and apply it
consistently (again, a reference manager will do this for you). The appendices contain anything that doesn't really fit in the main body of the
report but that you'd s!ll like to make available to your examiners. Nothing of cri!cal importance should appear in the appendices; the test for
whether something should be in an appendix is how big a problem it'd be if you just deleted the appendix. If the report becomes impossible to
follow with the appendices missing, then you've put too much important informa!on into the appendix. Things like large numbers of diagrams
(e.g., UML diagrams) or ques!onnaires are the kinds of things that are at home in an appendix.
Do I have to structure my report like this?
No. Every project is different. Most projects will have a structure that looks something like this, but if you think your project requires a radically
different approach for the report wri!ng then discuss with your supervisor. Most of the components I've laid out here are things that most
examiners are going to expect to see at some point in your report.
Do I need to use a template?
No, there is no set template you are required to use. I will demonstrate templates in the LaTeX typese%ng lecture that will arrive in a couple of
weeks, but you do not need to use the templates I demonstrate. Likewise, you can typeset using whatever you want. Word is fine. LibreOffice
is fine. If you want to write your project in Markdown and turn it into a PDF that is fine. Just make sure that the front page of your report lists:
Your name
Your student ID (the numbers, not your IT account name)
Your programme name
Your supervisor's name
The word count for your report
You need to make sure that referencing is correct throughout your report too. Use a cita!on manager, it'll make this task much easier.

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