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
Instruction:
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.
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.
