Project Reports

Final reports are due Friday, May 1 at 5 pm. Projects should be submitted in PDF format via email to csm2020-instructors@googlegroups.com.

Reminder: Because we want the reviews to be as blind to authorship as possible, do not include author information in your report and avoid providing information in the report that would directly identify you.

Final reports should be no more than 12 pages in length, including figures but not including references. Your report should include the following sections:

  • Introduction - Here is where you will establish what questions you are asking and why they are important. You will state concretely the objectives of your work. You will also provide sufficient background that a general scientific reader can understand what you are doing and why.
  • Related Work - You will describe briefly and give relevant citations to other work that addresses the specific systems and mechanisms you are investigating. If you are building on an existing model, you should cite that model and give a brief description here, or possibly in the Intro.
  • Methods - You will describe the methods, code, software etc. that you used to develop the model and simulations results you are presenting.
  • Results - Here you will describe the results of your simulations and other analyses. If you developed a new model you can also describe the content of that model in the first section of Results (you would describe the code and software though in Methods). For example, if you developed an ODE model in Copasi, you would briefly mention and cite Copasi and ODE's in the Methods section, but present the actual model - species and reactions - in the Results section. Your main results should be presented in Figures that are clearly labeled and captions that provide all of the necessary details to understand the figure contents. The text should refer to figures and summarize and explain the key features. Figures should be embedded in the text to make it easier for readers to view the data and read your interpretation without flipping back and forth.
  • Discussion - Should begin with a brief summary of the main findings from the Results. Discuss and interpret your findings, paying particular attention to any results that you think may be incorrect with an explanation of what you think might have gone wrong and how you would fix it going forward.
  • Conclusions and Future Work - Summarize and state whether you did or did not achieve the initial goals of the project.
  • References - Be sure to include complete list of authors and the title of the paper.
  • Contributions - A detailed accounting of which team members were responsible for which parts of the project. Note: Submit this as a separate file to preserve the anonymity of the report.
  • CODE - ALL MODELS AND CODE USED IN THE PROJECT SHOULD BE INCLUDED EITHER IN AN APPENDIX AFTER THE BODY OF THE REPORT OR AS SUPPLEMENTAL FILES.