Biology 118 – Assignment #4

Biology 118 – Assignment #4

Scientific Article Summary and Critique

Your assignment is to find a scientific ‘primary journal article’ that reports on any marine biology topic you find interesting. ‘Primary journal articles’ are the original sources where the results of experiments are published. Primary research article’s should have sections similar to ‘introduction’, ‘methods’ or materials and methods’, ‘results’ and ‘discussion’. Often these articles are not first thing that comes up in a google search. A good way to find them is to use alternate web search engines like ‘www.googlescholar.com’ and pubmed ‘www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/’. A second way to find primary research articles is to look up your favourite marine biologist’s personal webpage. They will often link to their own scientific publications.

At DePaul, our library system should allow you to access most articles for free. If a site asks you to pay for an article do not do it (some of your tuition money goes to this). You can ask me, or your librarian how to get the article for free. Once you have found your article, answer the following questions:

1. Provide a full reference for the scientific article you chose. You will need the following information.

Author names (all of them): _______________________________________

Year of Publication: ____________________

Title of article: __________________________________________________

Journal name: ___________________

Volume: ___________

Pages: ____________

Your reference will be written in the following format:

Authors. Year. Title. Journal. Volume. Pages.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For example:

Cousteau, J. 1997. The effects of coral bleaching on survival of Great Barrier reef corals. Marine ecology. Volume 231: pg 23-30.

(if there are multiple authors, list them one after another (separated by commas) in the order they appear on the paper)

Cousteau, J., Williams, A. 1997. The effects of coral bleaching on survival of Great Barrier reef corals. Marine ecology. Volume 231: pg 23-30.

2. Write a short summary of the article in your own words (maximum 300 words). These articles are challenging to read, so don’t worry if you don’t understand everything!

3. What is the most important message from the article (the take home message).

4. What terms, topics or concepts did you come across that you are unfamiliar with or feel you should know more about to better understand the article? (don’t worry if there are a bunch of these, list a few that you think are most important)