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Title of Work
Date
CHEM-E5200 Personal Research Assignment
Number of credits
Your name – ID xyzxyz
Supervised by: Supervisor’s name
1 Introduction
Introduction contains four major components:
1) Justification: Why is this important? Interesting? Timely?
2) Background of your work (remember to cite scientific papers properly).
3) Guidance to the reader: what are the main points the reader should appreciate?
4) Peek preview of main results (a glimpse, a teaser)
2 Experiments
Explain here the measurement set-up, chemicals, solutions, equipment, parameters, analysis
methods, etc. Do not explain why you used these particular ones, just tell that you used them. Their
performance, benefits and drawbacks are part of results and discussion. Keep this part clear and
concise but accurate. Think of somebody who wants to reproduce your results.
3 Results and Discussion
Present here the analysed results in Figures and Tables, give short explanations about results &
analysis. This part contains also a deeper discussion about the results: What do the results really
mean? Why? How do they relate to existing literature? Read scientific papers and refer to them,
find similarities and differences between your results and the results found in literature.
4 Conclusions
This part is not just a short version of Results and Discussion but real conclusions of your data.
Conclusions include for example:

What is novel?

What is useful?

What hypotheses were proved or disproved?

What is generic and what is special case ?

What problems remain?

What limits applicability?

What should be done to take the research to the next level?

Where will the impact be in the long term?
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Think your project also from the point of view of doing it all over again: what would you do
differently and why (i.e. “lessons learnt” but in scientific language).
5 References
Use a widely accepted referencing style and be consistent with it.
Some tips and hints about presentation of text, figures, tables and
references:
1. Please, do not use “Excel language” (i.e. NOT 1E-1) but proper numbers,
subscripts/superscripts and symbols (i.e. 1·10-1). Note this also in Figures and Tables.
2. In English, the decimal marker is a dot (.), not a comma (,), i.e. 5.3 cm, NOT 5,3 cm. Note
this also in Figures and Tables.
3. There is a space between the value and units, i.e. 4 m, NOT 4m.
4. The value and units must be in the same row (in Word, use CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE to “tie
the words together”, if necessary).
5. The equation editor is used to insert equations (i.e. equations are NOT written as normal
text, for example, A=lxw) and equations are numbered logically.
(a) EXAMPLE about equations:
Eq. 1 shows the calculation of sample area A
𝐴 = 𝑙∙𝑤
Eq. 1
where l is length and w is width.
6. Figure caption is written below the figure (italic font) and table caption above the table
(italic font); Tables, Figures and their captions are usually centered when embedded within
the text. Each Figure/Table is introduced in text before it and Figure/Table is explained in
more details after Figure/Table. Figure and Figure caption must fit in the same page and
the same is correct in most cases for Table and Table caption. In some cases, however,
Table might be so long that it needs several pages: in that case, each page must have the
title row of Table (=the first row usually showing the parameters & units) visible.
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(a) EXAMPLE about figures embedded within the text
Figure 1 shows the current density as a function of potential at different rotation speeds.
Figure 1. Current density as a function of potential at different rotations speeds with Pt
electrode: solution 1 mM ferri/ferrocyanide + 100 mM NaCl.
As Figure 1 shows, the absolute value of limiting current increases with increasing rotation speed.
(b) EXAMPLE about tables embedded within the text
Table 1 shows the size of Mg and Cu samples.
Table 1. Size of the copper and Mg samples.
Sample
Length / cm
Width / cm
Area / cm2
Mg sheet
2
1
2
Cu sheet
3
2
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The area of different samples was different (Table 1) which was taken into account in data analysis.
7. Be consistent with your referencing style. Write a proper reference to a scientific journal
(see example below) or a book, the copy of the webpage address or DOI is not enough. All
references must be in the right order in the text and in the reference list. All references in
the reference list must be referred to in the text.
(c) EXAMPLE about a reference (note the italic font, bold font, commas and dot in the end)
1. W. Qian, R. Hao, Y. Hou, Y. Tian, C. Shen, H. Gao, X. Liang, Nano Research 2 (2009) 706712.
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