Anth 151 – Literature Review — 1 Literature Review Assessment ( The goals of the literature review assessment are to: improve students’ abilities to use databases to track scientific debates;...

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Anth 151 – Literature Review — 1 Literature Review Assessment ( The goals of the literature review assessment are to: improve students’ abilities to use databases to track scientific debates; strengthen students’ ability to read and understand scientific papers; practice summarizing diverse viewpoints and the reasons that responsible researchers can disagree; practice evaluating sources of information and research-based arguments; and learn better how to prepare background research for any report, research paper or other project. ) The literature review will be a two- to three-page document (no more than four pages). The work will consist of complete citations for articles followed by short discussions of each source, and a final wrap-up discussion of at least 200 words locating the whole debate. Discussions of each article should cover the most important point in the article as well as it’s intellectual relationship to the other articles in the review (does it disagree with the main article, provide a central concept, ask a question that later gets answered or supply crucial data to prove or disprove a point made in another article). The assignment itself must use a MINIMUM of one target article (the starting point) and five other articles. The way to get articles that are related is to read the articles to see which other pieces the author(s) refer to and relate their work; in addition, make sure to use the citation databases (like Web of Science) which show which articles cite sources. ONLY USE REFEREED JOURNALS. The easiest way to make sure your sources are refereed (that is, all articles are reviewed by other scientists before publication) is to make sure that the sources appear in a database of peer-reviewed research (like Web of Science). Certain journals that appear repeatedly in your supplementary readings, like Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Human Evolution, The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Evolutionary Anthropology, are excellent sources. Please do NOT use popular science journals like Discover or Scientific American as these are not peer reviewed. Most of your sources will be journal articles as these are the most timely sources and the general location where scientific research is debated (though not always, especially not in all fields). Citation formats should follow the examples provided on p. 40 of the unit outline, with complete information (author, year, title, journal, volume, number and pages). For example: Peacock, J.L. 1969. Mystics and merchants in fourteenth century. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8(1): 47-59. Suggested strategy to complete assignment: Step One: First, find a popular science article or press release about a new discovery or finding in the study of human evolution. Online sources such as Science Daily (www.sciencedaily.com) and Science News (www.sciencenews.org) are excellent places to find press releases about new research, which is reported more fully in scientific papers (both of these resources sometimes link directly to the scientific papers). Step Two: Read the scientific paper and do your best to summarize in a couple of sentences or more the key argument. Do NOT plagiarize, especially the abstract, as this will be immediately obvious to the marker. Step Three: From the article, note the sources with which the authors seem to be in conversation most; ask, is there another point of view with which the authors are arguing or to whom they are attributing key ideas? Find these sources in the article’s bibliography and search for them. Step Four: Repeat Step Two with the additional articles you find for a minimum of five articles. You may need to repeat Step Three with the new articles OR Step Five: (This is very important!) You may use Web of Science to find more recent articles that either cite your original article or that also respond to some of the same articles your original article is citing. That is, using the ‘Times cited’ function on Web of Science, you can locate all peer reviewed articles that refer to one of your articles (Web of Science also has an ‘Article Linker’ foundation which will take you directly to our library’s version of these articles if we have it and it’s integrated to WoS). Google Scholar or some of the other academic databases may also work for this function, but do not use a normal search engine as it may direct you to non-reviewed materials. Step Six: After you have collected your articles, write a 200-word discussion of the whole stream that your articles provide. Ask yourself, have any early questions been settled in later research or earlier theories overturned? Do your articles represent two recognizable opposing sides? Have new theories emerged as discoveries force evolutionary theorists to rethink earlier ideas? In other words, tell a short story about how the scientists involved have interacted over time to produce new theory or ideas. Evaluation criteria will include the number and quality of sources (1+5 is the MINIMUM to pass); the accuracy and organization of the citations; the quality of the summaries (with no credit given for plagiarism); the evidence of research skill; and the quality of the summary paragraph. Please note: Do not include hyperlinks in your text, nor should you cut and paste text from the sources. If your Literature Review has odd multiple fonts or embedded links that suggest it was copied from online sources by cutting and pasting, I have instructed markers to count this severely against the final mark.