Developing your Course Project will take time and deliberate (ideally, spaced-out) attention. We begin early by identifying a topic and (importantly) making sure that there is likely enough research that you’ll be able to eventually build a whole term paper around it.

For feedback on this assignment, we’ll provide additional recommended sources based on your topic and the scholarly sources that you’ve identified as potentially interesting.

Objectives

  • Identify a topic you are interested in becoming an expert at.
  • Practice searching the relevant published scientific literature.

Time Estimate

4 hours (mostly spent generating ideas and browsing sources)

Assignment Instructions

Select a topic related to behavior genetics and find 5 scholarly sources about that topic. You do NOT need to read the entirety of each source right away but do read the abstract to be sure that the source is (1) relevant to your topic, (2) potentially interesting, and (3) scholarly (see how to distinguish scholarly sources from popular sources).

Most important: Pick a topic you’re interested in! You may choose any topic related to the course content (behavior genetics). If you need ideas for potential topics that will work, go through the course materials or skim some past programs for the Behavior Genetics Association annual conference.

Tip 1: If your topic is a specific phenotype, try searching Google Scholar for:

  • {phenotype} heritability
  • {phenotype} GWAS
  • {phenotype} genetics

Tip 2: Google Scholar sorts results to prioritize highly cited papers. You may want to restrict to recent publication years so you don’t get a bunch of out-of-date research (for example, select the ‘Since 2019’ option at top left).

Tip 3: If you find a paper you like, look for papers that that paper cites, or that cite that paper (click the ‘Cited by’ link under the reference listing in Google Scholar).

Tip 4: Where an author’s name is underlined in the reference listing on Google Scholar, follow the link to view their profile, which includes all of their published papers (useful if you find a paper that you really like, and you’d like to read more of their work) - you can sort by the number of citations (their most popular papers) or by year (their most recent papers).

Use APA format for the references. The Purdue OWL website is a handy free guide for APA formatting. If you find a reference on Google Scholar, click the image of the quotation mark to copy the APA-formatted citation.

NOTE: We use APA formatting throughout this course because (1) there needs to be some kind of consistent formatting across papers, otherwise, it would be a nightmare to provide instructions (You: “How should I format my references?”) and grade (Me: “Which study is this student referring to here?”), and (2) this course is housed in a Psychology department, so (3) APA is as good a standard to follow as any other.

Evaluation

3 points possible, basically either done or not (0.6 points per scholarly source).

Next: 10 Scholarly Source Summaries

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