Manuscript

General comments

• Before you write, read (a lot of) papers. It is essential to know the state of the art in your domain, and helps to adopt a scientific writing style (clear, unambiguous, concise, citing prior work,...).
• Use a clearly defined structure of the manuscripts (e.g. abstract, introduction, methods, results, conclusions, bibliography,...).
• The conclusions section is probably the most important part.
• Introduction should include:
  • review of the state of the art referencing relevant literature,
  • objectives and motivation of your work.
• The manuscript should also be understandable by scientists outside of your immediate field of research.
• It should be clear what you have done and what your colleagues have contributed to your work.
• Do not use a model or a tool (e.g. DIVA, Dineof, ROMS...) as a black box and give sufficiently details to describe them (possibly including equations, parameter values, relevant citations...).
• Do not neglect the interpretation and validation of your results.
• Data providers (satellite, in situ, etc) should be properly acknowledged and cited.
• The manuscript should contain enough details so that your results can be reproduced. Avoid vague or ambiguous language.
• There should be a map with all geographic names (currents, rivers, basins, cities...) referenced in the manuscripts
• For oceanography students, please read also the description of the master thesis

Text

• I you plan/are tempted to use a large language model like ChatGPT make sure to read the ULiège Charter for the use of generative artificial intelligence in academic work. Ask your promotor and jury and be transparent on how you plan to use it.
• Numbers:
  • two millions should be written as 2 × 10⁶ or 2 000 000 but not 2e⁶, 2.10⁶, 2e6.
  • Do not use comma (,) as the decimal separator in English.

Figures

• All axis should have labels (including units) for the x- and y-axis.
• Figures should have legends (including units).
• Labels should be large enough to be readable once the master thesis is printed (i.e. the reader cannot zoom). Either one reduces the size of the figure so that image does not has to be scaled down when it is inserted in the document or one increases the font size of all text elements (labels, titles, legends...). PyPlot in Julia:

using PyPlot

# figure of the size 5 in x 3.8 in for example (1 in = 2.54 cm)
figure(figsize=(5,3.8))  # default is 6.4 in x 4.8 in
plot(1:10)
xlabel("foo")
ylabel("bar")
title("title")
savefig("figure.eps") # preferable format for LaTeX
savefig("figure.png",dpi=200) # default dpi is 100

Or

using PyPlot

plot(1:10)
xlabel("foo",size=16)
ylabel("bar",size=16)
title("title",size=20)

In Matlab/Octave, use the commands

set(gca,'fontsize',14)
xlabel('texte','fontsize',14)

• All figures and tables should be referenced in the manuscript and adequately discussed.
• Prefer vector format (such as EPS, PDF, SVG...) for line or contour plots. For high-resolution images plotted with e.g. pcolor (and similar), vector formats can produce prohibitively large files. For such figures, the PNG format is better (but making sure that the text is not blurry). JPEG should only be used for photographs.

Bibliography

• Statements and findings that do not come from your own research should include a reference to the original article.
• Avoid citation of "grey" literature (i.e. unpublished reports, web pages, ...) and use peer-reviewed research articles and books instead.
• Bibliography should be uniform and complete.
• Never cut and paste text from another source except for short citations (clearly labelled as such).
• For LaTex user, it is recommended to use natbib and BibTeX.

Common problems with BibTeX:

• Double-check capitals in your title. Use two curly braces to preserve uppercase letters:

title = {{Four-dimensional ensemble Kalman filtering}},

• Double-check special characters (e.g. ø, é, ä, ...). Use either LaTeX commands (Alvera-Azc\'{a}rate) or the package inputenc (\usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc}).
• If you copy/paste references, check the dash (-), apostrophe (''' ' ''') or words containing fi, ff, ... as these characters may be wrongly interpreted in LaTeX.

Oral presentation

• Clearly state your objectives and the problem/question that you are addressing
• Finish with your conclusions (which is not just a summary of the work done)
• Pay attention to a proper balance between text and illustrations
• Use sufficiently large fonts.
• Check the readability of the text (including the text on figures and tables) on a screen before the presentation if possible.
• Check the size of the illustrations.
• Use well contrasted colors (e.g., black text on white background). On some projectors green is quite pale.
• Make sure that you stay withing the allotted time. It is often not possible to show all your results.
• Figures should have units and labels on their axes
• Numbering your slides makes it easier to ask questions on specific slides