Before writing a paper synthesizing a field of research, you must first develop an understanding of the (often highly complex) literature of that field. We do that systematically in this course by breaking down relevant scholarly sources using Summary Templates.

For this assignment, you will complete structured summaries (following a template) of 10 scholarly sources. The package of summaries that you submit must meet the following minimum criteria:

  • All sources must be scholarly sources (NOT popular sources).
  • All article summaries must follow either the Empirical Article Summary template or the Review Article Summary template, as appropriate.
  • At least 60% of the sources you include must clearly relate to genetics or the use of genetically informative data.
  • At least 60% of the sources you include must be empirical articles (that is, they report a new analysis of data; they are not just a review of previous research).

Exceptions to the above will be made in very rare situations as appropriate. If you think you have selected a topic where exceptions to the above criteria are appropriate, please contact us for an exception to the relevant criteria or suggestions for how to meet the criteria for your topic.

Objectives

  • Identify core details from empirical and review articles.
  • Identify themes/sub-topics addressed by scholarly sources.

Time Estimate

2 hours per summary x 10 sources = 20 hours total.

If you start in Week 5, at 2-3 papers per week, that’s 5 hours per week for 4 weeks. This is the LARGEST single milestone (by total time/effort/points) of the Course Project. Plan ahead to spread out your effort - you do NOT want to save this for the day before (even I don’t want to read 10 BG articles in one day).

Assignment Instructions

In your own words, complete an Article Summary Template for each of 10 scholarly sources related to your Course Project topic.

Most common: For empirical articles (that is, papers reporting a new analysis of data), use the Empirical Article Summary template.

Preferably no more than 1-3 sources: For review articles (that is, papers that summarize previous research with no novel analysis of data), use the Review Article Summary template.

You are welcome to lightly customize the templates as needed such as by adding or skipping sections (for example, if there are no figures or graphs, then you won’t have a favorite).

Please number your article summaries (any order you want, just make it easy for me to refer to in feedback, e.g. “For article 7…”) and start each article summary on a new page of your document (this makes it so much easier for me to grade, and happy graders are generous graders).

The primary audience for these summaries is your future self, when you start synthesizing these scholarly sources to construct your paper draft (which will itself be a review article). The article summary templates provide a note-taking structure based on the information that I know you’re going to need when you start writing.

Evaluation

15 points possible (1.5 per article). You’ll receive credit for each article summary as long as it’s clear you’ve made a genuine effort to extract the relevant information. Summaries missing substantial pieces of information will receive proportionate credit. For example, filling out a Review summary for an Empirical article would miss about 1/3 of the relevant content (methods description, effect sizes, replication, etc.) so would receive 2/3 credit, or 1 point out of the possible 1.5 per article.

IMPORTANT: Submissions that do not meet the following criteria will be returned for correcting before grading and may be resubmitted with late penalties applied as appropriate:

  • All sources must be scholarly source, NOT popular sources.
  • All article summaries must follow either the Empirical Article Summary template or the Review Article Summary template, as appropriate.
  • At least 60% of the sources you include must clearly relate to genetics or the use of genetically-informative data.
  • At least 60% of the sources you include must be empirical articles (that is, they report a new analysis of data; they are not just a review of previous research).

Exceptions to the above will only be made in very rare situations, and require prior approval. If you think you have selected a topic where exceptions to the above criteria are appropriate, please contact us for an exception to the relevant criteria or suggestions for how to meet the criteria for your topic.

Next: Draft Paper

Previous: Choosing a Topic & Finding 5 Scholarly Sources

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