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 27 (2 pts). The outline is due the week before spring break–March 10 (2 pts). The first draft is due on April 9 (10 pts), and the final draft is due on the last day of class April 28 (16 pts). When the paper topic is due 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

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.

The first draft is not intended to be a rough draft 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.

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.

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. Pages are text–not cover pages-not bibliography-not tables, 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 is not a source to be treated as anything more than an introduction.

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). It 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 useful resource is to use the Biology and Biochemistry Reading Room at the Library website. Make this a bookmark: http://info.lib.uh.edu/research/websubs/Subject_Guides/Biology_Biochemistry.html. You will have access to the electronic versions of a lot of journals–a convenient place to start is with the Journals in Ecology and Evolution. 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 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 Science Citation Index (SCI, found under Databases). This takes you to ISI. When you get there choose ‘Science Citation Index.’ One of the best things about SCI is that you can go 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–Science–1973. Choose Science Citation Index (you don’t really need Arts and Humanities Citation Index). Whoops! it turns out that it has been cited more than 1200 times. Try limiting it to papers published in the last 5 years.....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, provided they reference the paper you find as well as earlier papers on the same subject. You can also do normal (or very complicated) subject searches and search for papers by a particular person, etc.

There are a variety of other Databases that you can access from the Library, but the last best one is JSTOR. It is found under ‘various other databases,’ but 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 from JSTOR.

A few words about Plagiarism. Plagiarism is theft. The currency that scientists use is credit–credit for their ideas and words. It is certainly true that we don’t get paid much money so 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. I will check all of your papers on 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. 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 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. 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. It is also true that 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 the same. Just because you use a phrase that someone else has used, it is not plagiarism. You don’t avoid plagiarism by simply changing a few 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. It can also be true that 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 a few words -using although instead of however- it is still plagiarism.

This would be plagiarism and Turnitin would find it. However, if I understood the point and then tried to write the same thing without deliberately changing particular words and without looking at the paragraph, it would turn out differently.

If you must quote a source, put it in quotation marks and give the reference. However, putting in a lot of quotations is a lousy way to write a paper. 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 to turned in a paper that consisted of 62 sentences. At the end of 61 of them the same source was cited. This is absurd.

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.