2018¶

Today I spent a substantial amount of time (in excess of 8 hours) preparing my document templates in LaTeX using Sublime Text as my editor for both my weekly diary and my final report. Having a document template ready to go means that I’m encouraged to work on my writing from day one rather than leaving everything to the last minute.

Having read through the example report template and writing guide, I have my concerns about how a chemistry research project will fit into the prescribed structure, but will discuss with my supervisor further to figure out an appropriate way to write the report. Based purely on reading scholarly articles about similar topics and noting how they’re structured, they seem to completely omit the method section, quite often consolidating all the information into a series of diagram, such as:

Example of methodology condensed into a single figure showing reactants, products, reagents, solvents and conditions¹

I’ve decided to use the American Chemistry Society (ACS) referencing style as it’s incredibly simple and aesthetically pleasing, but mostly because it’s a commonly used standard within organic chemistry. It also has the benefit of being very well supported in both LaTeX and EndNote, rather than something like Swinburne Harvard which would require a significantly larger amount of work to get auto-citing.

I am happy with my LaTeX setup for the moment and have decided to embed my diary as a PDF into my canvas posts for ease of reading and feedback, but will upload the final diary entry as an attachment for grading.

Sasikumar, M.; Suseela, Y. V; Govindaraju, T. Dibromohydantoin: A Convenient Brominating Reagent for 1,4,5,8-Naphthalenetetracarboxylic Dianhydride. Asian J. Org. Chem. 2013, 2 (9), 779–785. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajoc.201300088. ↩