Paper

One paper is required for the course. There will be 30 total points given for the paper. The process will be to pick a topic (and get it approved), outline the topic, turn in a first draft and turn in a final draft. All of the deadlines are on class days. Paper topics must be approved by Feb 24 (2 pts). The outline is due the week before spring break–March 10 (2 pts). The first draft is due on April 14 (10 pts), and the final draft is due on the Tuesday after the last day of class May 5 (16 pts).

1. When the paper topic is due (Feb 24) you should have at least two references that are relevant to your paper. Your paper will be at least 10 pages, so it will be important to pick a topic that is large enough that you can write on it for an extended period. On the other hand, if a topic is too large you may be superficial in your coverage. Some examples:

Eusociality in Aphids

Reproductive behavior in burying beetles–mating systems and parental care.

Enemy specification

Stellar navigation system of migratory birds

2. The outline takes the topic and plots the sequence of ideas that you will cover. It does not have to be a formal outline–you can turn in a paragraph that describes what your paper will be about and the major points you think you will make. You will not be finished with your research for the paper yet so you do not have to adhere to the outline. Rather, this is a tool to get you to think about the organization of your paper.

3. The first draft is not a rough draft. I do not expect a paper that has a lot of spelling errors, typos, grammatical problems, etc. that you turn in for me to correct. Rather, this is to be a draft that I can read, think about and offer advice about further work that you can do to improve the paper. This is likely to be a paper that you would turn in, in another class. It should be a completed paper–I will just give you comments and suggestions on how to improve it and which direction to go further in. If you are having trouble with the writing you might try looking at resources in the Writing Center: http://www.uh.edu/writecen/Resources/ They have information on grammar, usage, etc. Some of the links are extinct, but a good resource.

4. The final draft will be a revision of your first draft with (I hope) my suggestions and your own new ideas taken into account. It may, or may not, require considerable modification.

Turning information in to me. The outline, first and final drafts should be emailed to me as a Word document. [if you work in WordPerfect or some other word processing format, save it as a Word file.] I will put comments on your file and return it to you, so it is convenient to have a single format for all of the documents. In the subject line of the email put: 4347 I will set up an email filter that will put all of your mail into a class folder. This will allow me to keep track of everything and ensure that your mail doesn’t go to a spam folder.

Due Dates. Each of these tasks must be completed before you can go on to the next step. If you don’t have approval for your topic, you can’t submit an outline. If you haven’t submitted an outline, you can’t turn in the first draft, etc. Assignments are due on the day given. I will accept material until that day is over (ie midnight). However, this means that I have to receive it in my email inbox by midnight. There can be a delay between when you send something and when it is received. You might think: ‘What difference does it make? He isn’t going to start grading anything until morning, I’ll just wait until 4am to turn in my paper....’ This paper is late. The consequence of turning in late work is a loss of points. Late topics or outlines lose 1 pt. If they are later than about a day (my judgment), you will lose all points for the topic or an outline. (You still have to turn them in before you can move to the next stage.) Late drafts of the paper automatically lose about 1/3. If the paper becomes later than about a day (my judgement, again) you will lose 50%. A paper that is egregiously late suffers a severe penalty, so let us not go there. My judgement about lateness and egregious lateness will have a lot to do with how closely you keep in touch with me. Things happen–I understand that. However, those who simply disappear without any communication don’t get much sympathy.

The Paper. The papers ought to be ten pages or more. This does not mean I won’t accept a paper that is less than 10 pages and that once you get to 10 pages you should stop. Topics have their own length and some of them can take many more than 10 pages to cover. Often people take this to mean that ‘he said that we could turn in a paper that is less than 10 pages, and 8 pages is close to ten, so....’ These people often find that they don’t do as well as others. Pages are text–not cover pages-not bibliography-not tables, not figures, etc. Please use 11 or 12 pt type, 1 inch margins and double spacing.

There is no requirement about the number of references that you need, but you need to adequately reference your writing. I will not permit the use of any web page references. All of the work that you cite needs to be from real, published sources. Journal articles and books. Some journals are only published online, however, they still have volume and page numbers. Visiting web pages helps your research, but the information that is there does not have to be accurate or true–anyone can put anything on a web page. Wikipedia is not a reference. I use Wikipedia all the time and I find it very useful for learning definitions, learning about the outline of a subject or even learning about something in considerable detail, but it should not be trusted as anything other than a place to begin. Your paper will be better if you use primary sources for your research (the place where a research finding is reported) rather than a general book that just summarizes research.

As you read journal articles, you will see that there are a variety of formats for citations. I don’t care which of the formats you use–just pick one and stick with it. Remember that the point of a citation is so that others can find the information you cite. You need the authors’ names, the year, the journal (or book), the volume (if a journal) and the page numbers. If you are citing a book, you need the title and I would like the title of the article if you are citing a journal article (even though it is not strictly necessary). If you are citing something from a book, it is very useful to have the pages that you are using, rather than just the number of pages in the book. Some examples of suitable formats (not the only possibilities):

W. O. H. Hughes, J. J. Boomsma, Evol. 58, 1251 (2004). [This is an example where the journal article title would be useful.]

Brown, J.H. and D. W. Davidson. 1977. Competition between seed-eating rodents and ants in desert ecosystems. Science 196:880-882.

Fisher, R. A. 1930. The genetical theory of natural selection. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.

Gordon DM, Kulig AW (1998) The effect of neighbors on the mortality of harvester ant colonies. Journal of Animal Ecology 67: 141-148.

Doing Research. A lot of your research can be done online, but not all of it. A very good place to start is the Biology and Biochemistry Virtual Library at the Library website. Make this a bookmark: http://info.lib.uh.edu/libraries/biology.html . You will have access to the electronic versions of a lot of journals. You can also search the Library web site for the journals that UH subscribes to. If we get paper copies but not the electronic version (which is true for older issues of the journal Animal Behavior-one which will probably be relevant), you will have to make a trip to the Library. If the library does not have the book that you are looking for or if we do not subscribe to the journal that you need, you can still get it from Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Click on Services then the Interlibrary Loan link. You will have to register for this if you have not already. Some items can be delivered in a day-others take a week, so don’t wait until the last minute if you are trying to use ILL.

This tells you what to do if you know where to look, but how do you find things to begin with? Sometimes it is easy to just type a few search words into Google or Google Scholar, but many times you just get a bunch of garbage. Use some search resources from the library. PubMed is one of them, although it does not have a lot of information that is especially relevant for the subjects of this class. Try this but don’t try only this. More useful will be Web of Science (found under Databases). This takes you to the ISI web of knowledge. When you get there choose ‘Science Citation Index.’ [Look near the bottom of the page and deselect the Social Science Citation Index and the Arts Citation Index–you probably won’t need them.] One of the best things about SCI is that you can go both forward and backward in time using it. Suppose you found an interesting article by Trivers and Willard from 1973. The article is pretty cool, but it was published 35 years ago! Is there anything on this subject that is more recent? You choose ‘Cited Reference Search’ fill out Trivers RL (the cited author) – Science (the cited work) – 1973 (the cited year). Whoops! it turns out that it has been cited more than 1300 times. Try limiting it to papers published in the last 5 years...or those that deal with mammals...and so on. You can find a lot of information in Science Citation Index. Most of the recent papers have the abstracts. Once you find a reference, you can find more recent papers on the same subject, or by the same author, provided they reference the paper you find. You can also find earlier papers on the same subject. You can also do simple (or very complicated) subject searches and search for papers by a particular person, subject, organism, etc.

There are a variety of other Databases that you can access from the Library, but the last best one is JSTOR. The best way to find it currently is to go to the main page of the library, click 'Research Tools' then 'Databases.'  It is really an archive of older journal articles. Many papers that are older than about 5 years are available from JSTOR. You can search JSTOR, and I guess this is why it is a Database, but I usually find things on Science Citation Index and just retrieve the papers through JSTOR.

A few words about Plagiarism. Plagiarism is theft. The currency that scientists use is credit–credit for their ideas and words. We value payment in credit for our ideas. If you plagiarize, you steal their ideas and credit. It is very serious and I deal with plagiarism very severely. I report cases of plagiarism to the Academic Honesty Committee. In most cases, people elect to take an F in the course rather than go through the hearing process. The penalty that I recommend for a student who is found guilty of plagiarism is to fail the course. I will check all of your papers through Turnitin.com. This is an anti-plagiarism service that UH has a contract with. Papers are checked against a zillion web sites and all of the other papers that have been turned in to Turnitin in the past. If you cut-and-paste information from a site, it is relatively easy to catch. If you cut and paste information from a published article it is also relatively easy to catch. You can try one of those companies that write term papers for you, those that guarantee that each paper is original, and that they are plagiarism detection-proof. Do you think that these folks are not selling the same paper to several people? or parts of the same paper? If a paper is turned in in California and then retooled and sold to you in Texas, Turnitin will find it. I have had a number of papers come back, where the only source is a paper from someone else’s class at another University. I am sure that Turnitin is not foolproof–nothing is. However, there is a good chance that someone plagiarizing will be caught. It is not worth it.

How to avoid plagiarism. Don’t cut and paste from web sites. Take notes while you are reading an article and then write your paper from your notes. Sometimes the best way to say something is the way that the author said it. No one thinks that using the phrase -the double helix- is plagiarism. Plagiarism is an extended passage that is identical or nearly so. Just because you use a phrase that someone else has used, it is not plagiarism. But you don’t avoid plagiarism by simply changing words -using although instead of but- it is still plagiarism.

Suppose I rewrote the paragraph above:

Do not cut and paste material from web sites. Take notes while you are reading articles and then write your paper using your notes. Sometimes the best way of saying something is the way that the author said it. Just using the phrase -the double helix- is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is a long passage that is virtually identical. Just because you are using a phrase that someone else has used, it is not always plagiarism. However, you do not avoid plagiarism by changing some words -using although instead of however- it is still plagiarism.

This would be plagiarism and Turnitin would find it. However, if I read the first paragraph, understood the point, and then tried to write the same thing, in my own words, without looking at the paragraph, it would turn out differently. Sometimes people are tempted to cut and paste a passage from a journal article and then go through it to make changes like those above. When I read a paper, I can tell when the writing suddenly becomes similar to that of a professional biologist. It raises my antennae and makes me look harder at the sources.

If you cut and paste a passage from a paper and then cite it, it is still plagiarism. If you must use a source verbatim, put it in quotation marks and give the reference. However, putting in a lot of quotations is a lousy way to write a paper. The paper should be your words, not a string of quotations stitched together. Remember that a quotation from a source should only be used when it is essential to use the precise wording of a passage. If you are just using the thoughts from a work, rewrite in your own words and cite it. When you have used a source for a piece of information or for an idea, cite it. Don’t go overboard, though. One year I had a student who turned in a paper that consisted of 62 sentences. At the end of 61 of them the same source was cited. This is absurd. It is obviously not plagiarism, but it is lousy writing.

Please understand that I am not trying to find people to punish for plagiarism. After I get the information back from Turnitin, I look at it to see what is going on. I check for citations, quotes, and common usage. I will use reasonable criteria when looking at your paper. Borderline cases do not concern me–but I deal very severely with cases that are over the line.