American Psychological Association.
For this paper, you will be randomly assigned a topic related to the material that is covered in the BIOL-112 course. You will use the library databases to find three (3) or more peer reviewed research articles related to the topic and you will read them. Then, you will address your topic by integrating the information from the articles into a single paper. One objective of this assignment is to improve your skills at reading scientific articles and learning from them. People will often learn or remember different parts of the same article. The point is not that you memorize or even understand the entire article, but rather that you can integrate what you did learn from the articles into your own work and properly cite the source where you learned it. Another objective of this assignment is to improve your scientific writing skills in general. To do this you will write a short paper on your subject. The paper will consist of three parts:
Title The title should be descriptive of what you actually wrote about, not just the general topic that you were assigned.
Body This is the main part of your paper. Do not just summarize the three articles that you read. You need to integrate the information from the articles into your own “story” or explanation. In scientific papers, nearly every sentence is followed by a citation (or multiple citations) to support the statement. Since you are just starting out and not reading very many articles, you may get by with three or four sentences per citation. You need to use in-text citations that use the author and year format to refer to the articles listed in the literature cited section. They look like the one following this sentence (Dertien et al. 2018). The body of your paper doesn’t have to be very long. Some people are verbose, while others write concisely. Write in your natural style and shoot for about a page. After you write the body, go through it and look to see that you’ve adhered to all of the lessons in scientific writing from the previous weeks. Fix what needs to be fixed to make your work more appropriate for scientific writing. Your natural style is probably not a scientific style, but it will be easier to edit the writing that is in your own style than to try to write unnaturally at first. In time and with practice you’ll be able to write more naturally in a scientific manner. And don’t worry, you won’t lose your “voice”. You’ll still be able to write your poetry or Harry Potter fan fiction even after you learn how to also write like a scientist.
Literature Cited This section lists the references that you used in your article. There are a lot of different citation formats or “styles”. The most common are probably APA (American Psychological Association) and MLA (Modern Languages Association), but there are many others like Chicago manual of style and CSE (Council of Science Editors). The main difference is that some are author year (e.g. APA) and others are number systems (e.g. MLA). Regardless, they are just different formatting rules for reporting the same information about the source. The most important thing is that you use one style consistently and that you are including all the relevant information so somebody could find the same resource. This includes the following:
Author(s), Date, Article Title, Journal Title, Volume and Issue, Pages, Digital Object Identifier (DOI) if applicable
Choose a style that uses the Author Year citation format and lists the references in alphabetical order by first author. If you don’t have a preference, APA is generally the most universal for scientific papers.