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Choose one of the two Mini Projects below:
Mini-Article:
The requirement is 800-2,000 words plus at least two figures that you have generated yourself.
The report should be in the form of a short article, with introduction, results, and discussion sections.
Moreover, you should include a "Contribution Statement" where you write down explicitly what was the contribution of each co-author.
The report should be delivered via the web page and has to be in pdf format.
If you work in a group of two or three students, you should deliver one report, but make sure that it contains all the names of the students in your group.
You can upload via the link given in the Calendar page at the bottom.
Deadline: April 7, 23:59 hours.
Guide to writing your reports
What should be the content of my short report?
Here we provide a list of things that your short report should contain in order to be accepted.
Feel free to extend this list yourself, but make sure that report size remains reasonable.
- Which sequences were used for the analysis, why did you make this choice and how did you obtain the sequences?
- Which method did you use for your analysis, and why?
- What are your results and your conclusions?
- Does your conclusion fit with the scientific literature and/or with your expectation? If not, do you have any suggestions for further research?
And here are some suggestions to make it a good report:
- Do not paste a number of figures and tables together with a minimum number of connecting sentences in between, but write a story from which you refer to a limited number of figures and tables, for example by writing "(see Fig. 3a)" at the end of a sentence that refers to the figure.
- All figures and tables should have captions and legends. Figures and tables should be self-explanatory.
- Do not write a sequential story of all the things you did! Make a selection of which results are truly interesting for your story, and make a plan for what is the most natural order to present these results.
- Scientific writing means that your sentences should be true statements. If you are not sure about the general validity of a statement you should re-write it into something more specific and less general. Statements should be proven with a reference to the literature (check scientific articles for ways to do this). If you want to talk about things you don’t know (like hypotheses, possible explanations, or suggestions), you may pose them as a question, or write “it is tempting to speculate”.
- Check your report for redundancy and repeats. If you have to describe the same thing several times, the structure of your story is not optimal, and you should change the order in which the results are described.
- Be concise, and do not elaborate on what is not important. Dare to make choices on what is important.
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