Conformity evaluation of report writing in a group of health sciences students

- Dissertations are the most significant documents of the academic curriculum and have an important role in preparing and empowering students to participate in their research activities. This study was conducted to confirm the evaluation of report (thesis) writing in Environmental Health Engineering. This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on 110 Environmental Health theses in Babol University of Medical Sciences from beginning up to September 2105. The data were gathered by means of citation analysis method using a tailor-made data collection sheet that consisted of 4 parts including general principles, structural principles, writing of references and dissertation content. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistical indexes. Our results showed that the compliance of general criteria in projects had a growing trend during past years. Also, specific criteria from 2010 to 2014 was associated with a trend of steady growth. Compliance of specific criteria has increased from 48.8% in 2010 to around 86% in 2015. Undefined statistical tests (54.6%), lack of hypothesis and research questions (34.5%) and unknown variables (30%) can be mentioned as content defects. Regarding references, 41% of the theses had some mistakes in the sequence of the references and 51.8% with problems related in style. Totally, 63.6% of references did not have complete information. Although the majority of theses have been valuable in terms of scientific content, but in structural principles, the dissertation content and the basics of writing references contained numerous errors. Obviously, monitoring can also improve the quality of academic education and research, avoiding waste of resources and achieving a satisfactory result among the students.