Summary: For this project please write an essay of 1200 to 2500 words on any topic that interests you (1) that involves paleontology or related field and (2) for which you can work into your essay a recent discovery or reinterpretation.
3 deadlines (read the directions to find out what these are about):
April 6th, 2004: send me your paper by email or post it to your own website.
April 20th, 2004: send me reviews of papers written by classmates
May 4th, 2004: send me revisions to your own paper based on reviews you received
Topic: To pick a topic that really interests you, you might tie the subject of your paper to some other interest you have, or you could take the opportunity to explore something new. Just a few examples include: dinosaurs in the movies, the relevance of mass extinctions to global change, visual arts in presenting paleontological information, using of dinosaur topics in theater, the influence of prehistoric vertebrates on science fiction, or the history of toys of prehistoric animals.
Approach to the article: Your topic can be (a) a review of information, (b) a persuasive about a point of view, or (c) offer a new perspective on a topic. You must, however, identify somewhere toward the beginning of your essay the intention of your essay. (Do not write “I choose letter (a)...” – write as if your reader is simply reading your article in a newspaper or magazine and cares nothing about the directions of the project.)
Purpose in my assigning you a project on recent research: Science is not static information in a textbook. It is something that people do to learn how the world works. Even as much as we have learned about the world in the past 200 years, there is a far greater number of interesting and important questions than there are scientists to investigate them. Though a very tiny fraction of current research ever makes the popular news, this is the primary means by which most people learn about current events in science. This part of the project has many potential purposes, but one purpose (#(2) above, and “phase II” of the process) is to get you thinking about the significance of the science itself, and another purpose is for you to think about the quality of the news you are reading.
How to go about picking your articles: You can pick a general topic first and then go looking for a recent article that can be used as a focus of the article, or you can find an interesting discovery first and come up with a general topic that would complement it. I will not ask you which you decided to do. In the directions below I describe finding the media article first.
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Phase I: Finding your articles
A.) Guidelines for what media articles are acceptable: Please search on the Internet or another source for a news article on a new discovery or interpretation of ancient life from any time interval in the geologic past (say, at least 10,000 years ago). Find an article that sounds interesting to you, of course, as this will become the basis for your project. The article should have been written 1999 or later. You may wish to print or photocopy the article, as a reference later.
Suggestion to make your article search more efficient: Use an Internet search engine such as Google or Vivisimo to make a search. I would suggest using the terms “science” and “news” in the search, and to modify it with “mastodon” or “dinosaur” or some other word that seems prominent and interesting from our course. Some topics get a lot more research and news, depending on the amount of research going on and the interest of the general public.
B. Find the original reference that the news was based upon. For example, the article may state that the news appeared in the scientific journal Science or Nature. Science and Nature are the most read journals in the science, and are in the Ithaca College library; they are also available on-line through Ithaca College. The articles are usually only 3-4 pages long. The article may give the date of the issue, or you may need to figure it out from the publication date of the news.
Photocopy or print the article for your reference and, when you finish, attach it to the end of your essay to be turned in.
Note about confusion about “primary literature”: For many students who have no previous experience with "primary literature," looking for it may be confusing. Nearly all scientific literature is first written for and reviewed by other scientists, who critique it and make sure it is of sufficient quality for publication. Only then (usually) do reporters from newspapers and magazines with general audiences write an article. (There are exceptions to the rule, but this is the generality.) So you are looking for that original scientific article.
Note on finding your article in a journal: “Journals” are simply magazines for specialized purposes. In scientific contexts, journals are usually referenced by “volume,” “number,” rather than month, but in the media context you may end up looking by date instead.
C. You should now look for some additional supporting information about your topic. To do a search for more information about this specific piece of research, or about closely related research, you can do a Google search using the author of the original literature, a genus discussed in the article, or some other fairly specific bit of information.
FAQ: What if my article doesn’t give the reference for the original technical article? Do an internet search and see if you can find another article that does. It may (or may not) take you a little while to find the right piece of research. Note that good journalism makes specific references to the source of the information; nearly all articles from major newspapers or magazines will include someplace in the article something like: “in this week’s issue of Science, a new dinosaur was found....”
Be careful: sometimes you may find an article about someone’s research in Science or Nature that is not the original you are looking for! How can you tell the difference between the original article and a scientist’s review, since the latter may also contain some jargon, etc.? Again, the science journalist will write in the article something like “on page xxx of this issue, so-and-so reports finding a new hominid....” You will also find that the original article is filled with lots of technical details that even scientists’ reviews does not get into.
Note that “original” scientific literature (“primary literature”) typically has quite a few literature references (probably 10 or more references, if not dozens). “Secondary” literature is reports about primary literature. Secondary literature will often have none or just a few references. So if you have an article that has few references, you might want to double check that it is really the original scientific publication.
(As an aside, “tertiary literature” would be compilations of the reports. For example, an author of a book may look in another book of secondary literature literature. You have probably heard stories about how rumors gradually get twisted the further removed they are from the original source; many pre-20th century scientific (and other) ideas have suffered such a fate, especially those written in languages other than English, because so few people bother to go back and find out what was actually written by the original authors! The moral of the story is – for whatever scholarship you may undertake in the future -- to take the time to check the original primary literature, to get to the facts.)
Example:
This is an example from some research that we have not yet covered in our class.
I found an article at
www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/11_6_99/fob1.htm
on Cambrian Period fish. This article is a fairly high level news article written by scientists for a scientifically literate audience (other scientists, science teachers, other science enthusiasts). From this I learned the original article, that is, the “primary” literature on this discovery:
Shu, D.-G. . . . S.C. Morris, et al. 1999 Lower Cambrian vertebrates from south China. Nature 402 (Nov. 4): 42.
In this issue of nature there is a review article about this discovery:
Janvier, P. 1999. Catching the first fish. Nature 402(Nov. 4):21
Janvier is a scientist and Nature is a scientific journal, but Janvier’s article is not the “primary” article on the discovery – Janvier’s article is a review for other scientists on the significance of Shu’s article.
Then to find out more about how this discovery is being covered in the populat media, I did a narrower search to find more media articles on this particular piece of news and found (for example) something from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_504000/504776.stm
Phase II: Writing your report
Write and design the report
The purpose of this report is three-fold.
As mentioned above, it will give you a chance to research something of personal interest, maybe something related to your field.
It also introduces you to peer review, the system by which scientific papers are revised (or rejected); this will be part of phase 3.
It introduces you ever so slightly to “web publishing,” if you haven’t done that before.
A. If you haven’t already, now it is time to choose a topic on anything to do with the history of life. Again, if could be not just science, but history, art, education, or any other field. More ideas: straight science – what really killed the dinosaurs? Or: What is the influence of paleontology on child development? How many misconceptions in dinosaur science are spread through advertisements? You will probably need to gather additional references about your specific topic.
B. Write a report/essay of 1200 to 2500 words (about 2 to 5 single spaced pages) long. The audience for your project will be the lay public, more specifically your class peers (and me). Write at the level of the educated layperson, but you should assume the viewer knows little about the History of Life (though of course your class peers know lots by now!).
Use your research from Phase I either as a case study or as the topic for your essay.
Within your essay you should integrate the following information from your case example:
the most important major new finding expressed in the original article. (This is a simple statement of what the finding is, not why it is important.)
why it was surprising or important scientifically. (This is why the research is important, not a description again of what was found.)
the basis for the discovery. That is, what is the age and locality of the fossils? Is the discovery a new fossil find, or re-interpretation of fossils that had been previously described?
the basis for the geological age, if given. (a particular kind of radiometric dating? Biostratigraphy? Tree rings? Some combination?) You may need to hunt in the original scientific article.
any uncertainties about the data or interpretation that make you think that this article may be questioned presently or in the future by other scientists. (This might (or might not) be presented in the scientific article itself.)
List references (all the articles, books, websites, etc. that are actually used in your paper). Indicate the position of the references within the paper at whatever points they are being used. Do not simply make a list of books and articles related to the subject you discussed, but that are not specifically mentioned in your essay. There is no minimum number, but please be aware that it will be obvious if you cite pieces of information without mentioning any source. Review articles may be easier to write in that less is required in terms of independent thinking, but obviously require more literature searching and use of more references.
For listing references, you can use any form that you are familiar with, as long as you are consistent within your essay. Examples include:
the footnote style used in the humanities;
the style used in Science and Nature in which all the footnotes are listed at the end of the paper; or
the standard scientific style of listing the first author and date of article at the point of reference. For example, here is a sentence that might appear in a scientific publication.
“Allmon and Ross (2000) claims that nutrients have played a key causal role in evolutionary patterns. In fact, nutrients may have played an important role in the Cambrian Radiation (Bambach et al 1977).”
References for the example above would then appear at the end of the paper in alphabetical order, and a specific style of giving the authors, data, paper title, and journal or book name, publisher, and pages. Again, For example:
Allmon, W.D. and Ross, R.M., 2000, Nutrients and evolution. Journal of whatever, v. 12, p20-30
Bambach, R.K., other names, 1977, Seafood through time, In: Booktitle. Publisher, city of publication. p.15-30
If you have never done referencing before, please consult a guide to referencing literature, such as:
http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~tdrewry/referencing.htm
or
http://www.itu.dk/English/degrees/internationalmaster/multimedia/study_program/refguide
(there are many others, and more in your reference library such as the University of Chicago Manual of Style).
C. You will turn in your report in two ways: Deadline April 6
A) Send your report to me at rmr16@cornell.edu:
Option 1: Send it to me as a Microsoft Word file.
Option 2: If you know how to make websites, have a place to post your paper, and don't mind being less anonymous, you might post it to the site. Feel free to use graphics and formatting. Simply send me the URL (that is, the website address).
In either case, use the following subject line to correspond with me:
Subject: THOL04 project lastname, first name
That is:
letters T-H-O-L and
then the numbers zero-four and
then the word “project” and
then your name with your last name first (separated by a comma).
For example:
THOL04 project Ross, Robert
B) Hand in a printed copy with the technical paper appended.
Phase III: Reviewing your peers
In this part of the project, you will review several of your classmates’ papers (both you and the authors will be anonymous), and your paper will be reviewed by classmates.
A. How to find the paper you submitted in the list of papers submitted to the web: You will find your own project number on the list of research projects.
The list of peer-reviewed projects can be found here.
You can find your paper in the list of papers from your class, by looking through the titles. I removed the names of authors from the papers, so the process would be anonymous. If after searching through the papers you can’t find a paper that you sent, please let me know.
B. Finding the papers you should review: In the list, the projects will be numbered, and you will be responsible for judging (anonymously) as best you can the 3 projects you are assigned to review. Here is the plan for assignment: review the 3 projects directly after your own project in the list (if you name is at the bottom of the list, simply begin again at the top) on the day you look at the list.
C. Reviewing the papers: Anonymously review the papers on 3 characteristics and write a short review for each paper. For each of three 3 characteristics, in addition to a verbal description, please give a numerical rating from 1=poor, 2=needs fair amount of improvement, 3=reasonable, 4=very good, 5=excellent.
Please do not consider graphics and formatting in your ratings [if you go to a website], but feel free to comment verbally if you felt something about these characteristics were very positive.
Keep in mind that you are writing to the authors and also to me (the editor).
It is imperative that you give these reviews as neutrally as possibly, or the system doesn’t work; this very same issue is obviously critical in real life.
Now please go to a form that you can “cut and paste” into an email and use for your answers:
Now please go to a form that you can “cut and paste” into an email and use for your answers:
D. How to send your reviews to me: Send your responses to me at rmr16@cornell.edu, using a separate email for each paper. Deadline April 20th.
The subject line should read:
Subject: THOL04 Review of project # Lastname, Firstname,
in which # is the number of the paper.
For example:
THOL04 Review of project #24 Ross, Robert
E. How I return the reviews to authors: I will check the reviews, and make sure they seem reasonable. Reviews will be returned to the authors, unless I find them unreasonable (they may be too critical, unjustifyably good, or just lacking any insight). I will be the “editor;” I will help get reviews, but will not do the reviews myself.
In a real life situation, reviewers and the editor must decide if a paper is worth publishing, but I don’t think we need that kind of system now.
Phase IV: Editing your paper according to reviewer comments
Reading reviews of your paper: I will disseminate reviews after I receive them. Then read your reviews. Try to wear a “thick skin” and take the reviews seriously.
Now edit your paper accordingly. Authors may disagree with reviewers and not make certain requested changes, but if so must respond to the editor with an explanation for not following the indications of reviewers.
I will look at the edits you made.
Sending me the revised version: Follow step 3 for sending me the revised version. Deadline May 5th.
In the subject line write
Subject: THOL04 Research project # revision lastname, firstname
The # should be the number assigned to your project.
Authors should describe their major changes in the body of their emails.
Your grade will be based on 50% the quality of your initial report, 25% on the quality of your reviews, and 25% on the quality of your revisions.