The first review is an important academic exercise and must provide your assessors with clear evidence that you understand the context and aims of your work. You should have appropriate and achievable research plans with some evidence of progress; this might be with data acquisition, analysis and discussion.
The first progress review report should be written in your own time and should not delay the progress of your research. In addition to your written report, the panel will expect you to give a 10-15 minute presentation as explained earlier.
Content of the report
The Graduate School recommend the following structure for your report, with a word limit (excluding references and figures) of 7500 words. Reports must be uploaded via ePortfolio.
- A table of contents.
- A literature review, perhaps the most important part of this report. It should be up-to-date, comprehensive and fully referenced, and in many cases can be submitted to a journal for publication.
- A clear statement of the aims of your project.
- A summary of approvals as appropriate, methods developed and results to date. Some students – particularly where methodological developments or regulatory approvals are involved – will have relatively few results before the end of their first year.
- A discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of your work to date.
- An outline and timeline for your future work. The APR is an important features of regular progress review is to reinforce awareness of the timeline leading to successful submission of a thesis.
MPhil students
With just one year of full-time research, time is even more precious for MPhil students. Therefore the first progress review should be a rather shorter document but should contain a significant literature review, a statement of your aims and details of your progress to date.
We suggest a word limit (excluding references and figures) of 3000 words for this report, but would not wish to discourage a longer literature review for use in your MPhil thesis.