Rules of application to the conference
1. Eligibility: to be eligible to apply, you need to be a student who conducted research in a field of biology, and your research needs to be affiliated with ELTE in any of the following three forms:
a) You or the co-author of your TDK work is an enrolled (BSc or MSc) student at ELTE (passive semesters also apply).
b) Your TDK work has been supervised by a researcher or faculty member affiliated with ELTE.
c) You are a high school student with a co-supervisor at ELTE who submits a written statement that your work complies with the usual standards of a BTDK application, and it has not been submitted to another TDK conference.
2. The number of authors cannot exceed 2; only BSc and MSc students and high-school students conducting research work can be authors of a BTDK application. MSc students who have received their pre-degree certificate (abszolutórium) are not eligible as authors.
3. The number of supervisors (named in the TDK work) cannot exceed 2.
4. Those who have been awarded a prize (1st, 2nd or 3rd) at an earlier TDK conference, can only apply with a research that is substantially different from their previous, prize-winning TDK work (representing either a new project, or a substantial advance in the previous project). In these cases, please, send your previous TDK essay to btdk@btdk.elte.hu (no later than the deadline for the submission of the essays), and the evaluation panel will be asked to consider only the new results (relative to your earlier prize-winning work) in the evaluation of your research.
Application to the conference requires the online submission of an abstract (maximum 1500 characters). We rely on the abstracts to organize the sessions of the conference. The essays must also be uploaded to the electronic system (to the appropriate deadline).
Rules and criteria of evaluation
About the essay:
Length limit for the body of the text: 27000 characters (including spaces). The count excludes the title page, table of contents, list of abbreviations, summary, references, acknowledgements, figures and tables. Figure and table legends, boxes and appendices are counted into the limit, as are all items not explicitly listed among the exceptions.
Max number of figures and tables: 12.
Figures and tables must be embedded in the text. Figures, tables and equations must be numbered, and cited in the text accordingly. Short titles are recommended for figures and tables. References can be listed in any format used in scientific publications (the same format must be used consistently).
Recommended settings: 1.5 lines spacing, 11 font size, 2.5 cm margins.
Recommended structure: Table of Contents / Summary (abstract) / (list of abbreviations) / Introduction / Objective /(Aims) / Materials and Methods / Results and Discussion / Author Contribution / References. (Some deviation is allowed: e.g., Introduction and Aims in a single chapter; Results and Discussion in separate chapters; etc).
In the description of the research, the individual work of the author must be made clear throughout the essay.
The Author Contribution is an obligatory element of the essay. It must be a bullet point list of the actual contributions of the author to the described work in max. 4 points, 1 sentence per point. It must be followed by a statement on previous awards achieved within the Hungarian TDK system, according to one of the following two templates:
“Hereby I declare that I have not been awarded any prize at previous TDK conferences in Hungary. Should I be awarded a prize at another TDK conference before the current BTDK event, I will inform the BTDK and send my award winning essay to them.”
OR: “Hereby I declare that I have been awarded … prize at the … TDK conference. I submit the award-winning essay as part of my application for the current conference.”
If the author has been awarded a prize at a previous TDK conference, and the awarded work has an overlap with the new submission, then only the new results will be evaluated by the referees.
According to the call of the 37th OTDK, Section Biology (Appendix 1, section #2, on the application of artificial intelligence in content generation), the application of ChatGTP, and other text or content generator applications, artificial intelligence based tools are allowed at writing the TDK thesis and creating the presentation, the specification of the fact of which involvement, and the extent of the contents that are generated on the mentioned ways in a mandatory element of the TDK theses.
A few examples for the statements:
“I prepared the first version/parts of the Introduction using ChatGPT“.
“I prepared the first version of the Summary based on the main text body using ChatGPT, that I edited to a lesser/greater extent“.
We call the attention of the Authors that by submitting the thesis you take all responsibility for the novelty, the liability, and all words of the thesis, including all text parts generated using artificial intelligence based tools. We call a special attention on the investigation of literature references that are suggested by artificial intelligence based applications, since the Authors take all responsibility for them, too.
Evaluation of the essay (by the 2 referees)
- Significance, novelty and presentation of the topic. Was the author able to place his/her topic into the wider context of the scientific literature? (1-5 points)
- Presentation, suitability and application of the methods. (1-5 points)
- The quantity of the work and the overall standard of the results. (1-10 points)
- The discussion and interpretation of the results. Are the conclusions supported by the results? (1-5 points)
- Structure and style of the essay. (1-5 points)
- The max 30 points of the essay make up 3/8th of the overall points (i.e., the presentation is considered with greater weight).
Presentation
Length: 12 minutes + 6 mins for questions.
As a rule of thumb: don’t use more than 12 slides.
Recommended reading: http://journals.plos.org/
File format: ppt(x) or pdf
If there are two authors, both must participate in the presentation.
Evaluation of the presentation (by the jury members)
- Scientific value of the work. (1-10 points)
- Quality of the slides. (1-5 points)
- Quality of the presentation; presentation skills. (1-5 points)
- Background knowledge and responses to questions (1-5 points)
- Max. number of award per section: 1/3 of the number of participants.
The total score is calculated as the score of the essay plus twice the score of the presentation. In each session, 1/3 of the participants can be awarded a prize; however, the number of participants qualifying for the national OTDK is not limited, the qualification is based on absolute criteria.