ASSIGNMENT

After doing this assignment (and after doing the tutorial) you'll know much of what you need to know about using library resources for this or other classes, including ones outside the sciences!

Do your own work on the assignment but you may help each other interpret the directions below or ask for help from the professor or science librarian. Do not intentionally choose the same items as a classmate for this assignment. 

ASSIGNMENT STEPS:

(1) Review differences between scholarly & popular articles

Read the page "Scholarly versus Popular Articles".

(2)  Find a *popular* account of research that appeared in a scientific/scholarly journal article.

To get an illustration of what this question asks for, scroll down and review Part A of the "Worked Example" in the box below this one. For this exercise, do not use the particular item mentioned in the example titled : Did we come close to extinction? ).  

Steps:

(a. ) Go to the "Popular Resources" page of this guide (see on the left) and select an information resource to search. You can select "Research Library" (used in the worked example below this box) or one of the other resources. 

(b.) Use the popular resource to find a recent (within the past two years) popular media item that:

• is for a popular audience, for example, a newspaper or magazine article, podcast, Youtube, or TV news segment.
• describes research that appeared in a scholarly article; the research must be related to human genes or genomes and that has an evolutionary focus or that deals with ancestry in some way. 

Ideally the popular item will say something like "last week researchers at ABC institution published a study in Journal 123 about their new discovery of XYZ."  But in some cases, as in the worked example in the box below, it will not be this simple. You may need to do some detective work by finding bits of information that lead you to discover the full text of the article. Ask for help if you have trouble.

Provide: Title, article or publication name, date, and web address associated with the item.

(3) Summarize the popular item  

How is the topic of the popular item you found related to human genomes? Summarize the main points of the item in 3 - 6 sentences or bullet points. 

(4) Use the CRAAP (C-Test) to evaluate the popular item

Evaluate whether the popular item meets the C-Test criteria in the page of this guide titled "Evaluating Scientific Credibility". Describe the evidence for each criterion. (You may find it useful to read the material below each element of the C-Test test, for future reference.)

(5) Find the scholarly article that the popular item references

Review Part B of the "Worked Example" in the box below this one.

Use one of these ways to look up the full text of the scholarly article mentioned in the popular item you found:

• Google Scholar  As in the worked example in the box below, put whatever clues into Google Scholar the popular article gives you for finding the scholarly article--for example, the author of the study or the journal in which the research appeared.
• If Google Scholar doesn't work, use another database that appears in Scholarly Articles.

In (12) you'll provide a citation for the scholarly article.

(6)  Use the popular article to frame some questions to inform your reading of the scholarly article

Before reading the scientific article that the popular item references,  pose two questions about it based on your reading of the popular item. Example questions: how the scientists conducted their research, what evidence they report, how they interpret this evidence, or what other research has been done in this area.

(7) Compare the scholarly and popular articles

Write two or three sentences comparing the popular item to the scholarly article. You don't need to read the scholarly article in depth to do so.

See the resource in question (1) above for points of comparison.   

(8). Find a non-review journal article

Find one non-review article about the topic of the journal article you found. To do so, write up a search statement and run it in Web of Science. Click on the one of the search results and make sure it says 
"Document Type: Article", and not "Document Type: Review".

In (12) you'll provide a citation to the item.

(9). Was the article cited?

How many times was the article cited by other article(s) in Web of Science?  Finding articles that cite articles published earlier in time (whether or not they are review articles!) is a powerful way to build bibliography. 

(10).  Find a review article.

Now find a review article by limiting the search results from the search in (9) to a review article. You can do this to the left of the search results by Document Type "Review Article".

In (12) you'll provide a citation to the item.

(11). Use "background information" to understand a concept 

Go to the background information page of this guide and find one resource that explains or defines a concept mentioned in the scholarly article you found in (5). Make sure it is not a scientific or scholarly article (including reviews). Provide: Title, article or publication name, date, and web address associated with the item.

(12).  Create a references in National Library of Medicine style for the scholarly articles you found above in (5), (9) and (11).   

Put the journal articles you found into the National Library Medicine reference style. This is not for an in-text citation but for the full citation reference as it would appear at the end of a  journal article.

Go to the page of this guide titled "Citing and Plagiarism". You can ignore for now the information about in-text citations on this page; just focus on creating a full reference citation.  First use Zoterobib to generate a full reference citation. Then check whether Zoterobib accurately rendered the citation. To do so, compare the Zoterobib output to the example in the box labeled "Journal Citation Style -- NLM".

NOTE: don't confuse the journal name with the publisher or database name. 

WORKED EXAMPLE 

PART A: HOW TO FIND A POPULAR ARTICLE THAT DISCUSSES A SCHOLARLY ARTICLE

This is the example we did in class. 

Go to Research Library
In the Advanced Search page, put in this search:

genom* AND (evol* OR ancestr*) AND human*

Select Publication date.  Select last one year.
Under "Source Type" on the same page, select  popular sources such as Magazines and Newspapers. This will bring up popular sources. (You can also add blogs, podcasts and websites.)

The search comes up with an entry: Did we come close to extinction? from the popular magazine "New Scientist".

This article describes research disclosed in a scientific article.

PART B: HOW TO FIND THE SCHOLARLY ARTICLE
Look in this popular article for clues that will lead you to the scholarly article.

Clues: 

• a researcher named Haipeng Li of the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health 
• the article names  the scholarly journal where the research was published (Science) [ignore this: d0i.0rg/gsnt3b--it's not a correct link]
• assume it was published in 2023, on the basis that the New Scientist article is from Sept. 2023 and may be reporting a recent journal article 

Now:

• Go go Google Scholar. 
• Select hamburger icon, upper left.
• Select the advanced search.

Put in:

• Return articles authored by:  Haipeng Li
• Return articles published in: Science
• "Return articles dated between":  2023-2023.

Now you can find the full text of the scholarly article:

Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition (Hu et al., Science August 2023)

To get to the full text, look for Lehigh Links and go out to the full text. If you don't see Lehigh Links, follow the instructions here for making Lehigh Links visible in Google Scholar.

Note: you can also add keywords or phrases that you anticipate might bring up an article, should the procedure above not work.