Guidelines Period 1: report and assessment
The first research training period must be concluded with a full report describing all the studies that were performed in the training. The structure of the report is similar to the structure of an article, for which some guidelines are found below. The student must write the report himself/herself based upon his/her own work and will be the only author of the report.
The scheduled internship period includes the writing of a full report. The almost-final version of the report should be submitted to the Internship Supervisor in time for proper assessment and to give students the possibility to include suggested improvements in the final internship report. The final version of the report should be submitted to Supervisor and External Assesor for grading within 6 weeks after the research training period was completed. Students should communicate to the Internship Supervisor and the External Assessor when the report will be ready for assessment. The external assessor may ask up to four weeks for his/her assessment.
At time the final report is submitted to the External Assessor and Internship Supervisor the completed internship report has to be uploaded to Blackboard: course UMCN-MMD-IS-1112 1112 Internship MMD \ Assignments, for a plagiarism check by the Turnitin programme. Students will be notified by the MMD programme coordinator in case plagiarism is detected.
Full report
The report should be written according to the following guidelines:
The text may be up to 50 pages with a spacing of 1 and letter size 12 Times New Roman.
- Full title page (title, author, supervisor(s), department, training period, duration of the training period, date of the report).
- Abstract: This is a short but full description of all important aspects of the research internship (250 words maximum) containing: aim, research question, methods, results and conclusion.
- Index with numbered pages.
- List of non-common abbreviations.
- Chapter 1: Introduction. The introduction provides an overview into the field so that the reader can understand the reason for conducting the research. Furthermore, a brief introduction of the literature in the field concerned. The introduction concludes with stating what the most relevant open questions in the field are.
- Chapter 2: Research question. This chapter explains the specific research question and the relevance of this research question to progress in the field.
- Chapter 3: Methods. This chapter describes how the research was conducted. The following points will be addressed:
- Research design
- Materials
- Techniques and instruments
- Methods of analysis
- Chapter 4: Results. This chapter presents the results. The results should be described in the text and this description should be supported with figures, graphs and tables. The figure legend should give a brief description of the experiment but not of the results.
- Chapter 5: Discussion. In this chapter, the following points will be addressed:
- Results versus research question
- Possible restrictions due to methods or execution
- Consideration of the results relative to the present literature
- Possible adjustments and future experiments
- Chapter 6: Translational Aspects. The translational and/or societal aspects of this research project should be specified in this obligatory paragraph, for example implications for diagnosis and treatment of specific diseases.
- References: The following design is advised:
- Books: Surnames of authors with initials and if possible name suffixes (year, edition). Title, Place: editor.
- Articles: Surnames of authors with initials and if possible name suffixes. Title. Name of the journal (year); year of publication, volume, first and last page.
- Appendices: for example: research instrument, letters, tables and figures, glossary, etc.; supplementary material.
In some cases, if results are presented which are obtained together with other persons (for example the Daily Supervisor) a statement on these other persons contributions has to be added to the internship report to enable proper assessment of the student's own contributions. Specify in such a case which panel of which figure represents an experiment conducted by someone else.
For the student administration, two printed copies are necessary. The Internship Supervisor indicates how many printed copies are needed for the host Department (minimum of two). The host department pays the printing costs of the reports. Additionally, a pdf file of the final report needs to be submitted to the programme coordinator.
Assessment Internship 1
The internship is assessed on the following points:
- Professional attitude and activities during the internship (50%) (judged by Internship Supervisor)
- Written report (50%) (judged by Internship Supervisor (15%) and External Assessor (35%))
An assessment form for the internships is available on Blackboard. Internship Supervisor and External Assessor have to give their grades independently. If these grades differ by 1.5 points or more a third assessor will be asked to assess the report. A motivation of the final grade on the assessment form is required.