5/30/07

University of Texas at Dallas

Program in Geographic Information Sciences

Content Requirements for Final Report

This guideline provides information about the content requirements for any final report (hardcopy or digital) submitted to the Geospatial Information Sciences classes. Generally, the report should contain sections equivalent to the following:

I. Introduction:

II. Literature Review

III. Study Area and Data Sources

IV. Analysis/ Methodology

V. Results and Discussion

VI. Conclusions and Future Study

VII. References/ Bibliography

VIII. Appendices (if necessary)

Each of these sections is described in more detail below in order to help you understand its purpose and explain the type of information it should contain.  If any of these sections is not present in the document, the student will be asked to justify the omission during the final presentation.

I. Introduction

The Introduction section provides a big picture of your research plan. It establishes the topic area with a general statement of the research scope, defines the project objective, and explains why it was chosen and how it is significant. It should have most of the following components, although not necessarily in that order.

• Establishing the topic area in which the research is conducted (what is your interested area).
• Providing the audience with background about the general subject at hand (what this area is about).
• Introducing issues remained to be addressed, the problem(s) that encountered, or question(s) need to be answered (what you want to research).
• Discussing the motivation for undertaking the research (why you chose this topic).
• Formulating the specific research objective or hypothesis of the project (what you want to achieve).
• Describing briefly how the research problems will be addressed (what is your solution).
• Indicating the significance or potential impacts of your solution to the problem (why that is important).
• Providing an opportunity to briefly outline the rest of the document.

II. Literature Review

The Literature Review is an absolutely essential element of any research project. It is imperative that you explain the state of the existing body of knowledge by identifying the most critical works relevant to your project. You cannot assert that an original contribution has been made unless you have reviewed the contributions made by others in the field. Without a literature review there is no way to know that someone hasn’t already accomplished the goals of the proposed research.

• Defining important terminology of the research area that is important to your research
• Providing necessary knowledge for understanding the research question(s) and solution(s).  
• Identifying the key pieces of existing research relevant to the question(s) by citing peer reviewed articles and conference papers. Only important literatures directly relevant to your research problem are needed. Previous researches that are not closely related should not be discussed.
• Analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of these important research works.
• Expanding your research objectives by emphasizing the contribution(s) you may potentially bring to the current literature.
• Listing all references cited in the literature review (or elsewhere in the manuscript) in the References section at the end of the document.

III. Study Area and Data Sources

The Study Area and Data Sources section should provide a general description of the study area and explain in detail the material that you used to conduct the research. You need to include the following information.

• Describing the geographic scope, important features and critical variables of your study area.
• Providing overview/reference map(s) of the study area in the context of big geographic region(s)
• Explaining in detail the data to be used to solve your research problem and presenting figures and tables to describe the data if necessary.
• How the data were collected (what was the method of collection)?
• When the data were collected (on a single date or over a period of time)?
• Why the data were collected (what research questions were the data originally meant to address?)
• What the characteristics of the data are (e.g. spatial, spectral, temporal, and radiometric resolution, etc.).
• Describing the sources of these data, i.e. individual or agency that provided the data.
• Providing description on any pre-processing of the data (such as address matching) in order to make it more useful in approaching the research project.
• Listing all of the data sources in the References section.

IV. Analysis/Methodology

The Analysis or Methodology section of the report is where you describe the specific processes that have been used (with the data described in the previous section) in order to address the research question.

• Describing the methods used to achieve your research objectives
• What algorithms were used with the data
• What statistical procedures were applied, what – if any – simplifying assumptions were made,
• What equipment or materials were used (including software and hardware), should all be addressed.
• Explaining the steps in any complex procedures (perhaps with a flow chart), although common statistical procedures need not be explained in detail. The steps in procedures should generally be ordered chronologically.
• Providing enough detail such that another researcher can replicate the results of the experiment. Attaching actual or pseudo programming code to appendices if necessary.
• Presenting important equations and formulas, and give specific quantities (distances, weights, concentrations) of values that were used in the procedures whenever possible

V. Results and Discussion

The Results and Discussion section describes your main research findings by reporting the results observed from the analytical procedures described in the previous section and providing explanations on why such results were obtained.

· Reporting all significant results whether or not they support your objectives or hypothesis.

· Presenting the most important results in general, while simple results should be presented before complex results.

· Including tables and figures to help present your observed results. Do not simply repeat tables of output data, instead select results that are representative of the research findings.

· Explaining the causes that produced the results you observed, describing the implication of the results, beyond simply reporting the results.

VI. Conclusions and Future Study

Conclusions and Future Study section discusses the significance of your findings relative to your initial project objectives or hypotheses, and proposes future studies by providing guidance for other researchers in this field. There are four primary components to the conclusion:

• Summarizing your project by listing important items in the previous sections.
•  Assessing the results of the research, relative to the project objectives laid out at the start. Stating if the goals and objectives have been met, and if not, why not.
• Describing the new contributions that this research has made to the research field. The claims made here must be substantiated by the research results. You may want to refer to the work of others in order to make comparisons.
• Guiding future researchers to areas where additional research questions have been identified. The process of answering research questions virtually always leads to additional research questions, and you should anticipate some of the more pressing new research questions to be emerged. Suggestions for improving the work described in the report, or expanding on the research are valid directions for future research.

VII. References/Bibliography

This section provides standard format citations for all resources drawn upon for the project, in a section titled “References”, “Bibliography”, “List of Works Cited”, or “Citations”.

• Listing the sources for material cited in the document and used in the research.
• Follow one of the formats used in journals in the field of Geographic Information Science or Remote Sensing. The format for references should be consistent throughout the entire document.
• Making sure that each and every source used in the completion of the research and cited in the document is listed in the References section. At the same time, every source listed in the References section should be cited in the report. 

VIII. Additional Materials (Appendices) if necessary

Appendices typically contain supporting material such as data sheets, questionnaire samples, illustrations, maps, charts, program code, detailed tables of results, and other items that are not appropriate for the main body of the text. In a web environment, these would typically be additional pages accessed via hyperlinks from the main page.

Academic Ethics

The student is responsible for ensuring that all standards of publication (including fair use, copyrighting, patents, and publication rights) and all standards of research are met, including, where appropriate, approval of the Human Subjects Committee (contact the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Education). Material that exceeds fair use requires permission of the copyright owner. Students should allow adequate time to secure all necessary permissions before they submit their master’s report. If there are any disagreements about decisions, deadlines, policies, procedures, and issues of academic judgment, the parties involved should attempt to resolve these issues internally in the spirit of collegiality.