Scientific Review Paper On Gymnosperm
For this class, you will be choosing a lineage (clade) of plants or evolutionary question related to any of the green plant lineages, to research and investigate by reading, summarizing and synthesizing primary literature (peer-reviewed articles describing results of original studies) and secondary literature(review papers, popular news and magazine articles, textbooks)literature. Your paper will be in the style of a scientific review paper, so you will need to be thorough in your search for academic sources. You will choose one type of review paper to emulate in this assignment. The goal of this assignment and a review paper in general is to summarize the current state of knowledge about an interesting question in plant diversity.
Final paper will follow APA paper format. Final papers should be spell checked and proofread, use complete sentences, excellent grammar, be edited for brevity and high information content, specific and academically appropriate language, and use “MEAL”format for paragraphs (see CUDenver Writing Center handout). Your paper should not simply be a “report” summarizing a handful of articles, but should demonstrate your original thought and synthesis of ideas. Although some facts are important to lay out in the introduction (and your introduction should be more than one paragraph and can be fairly lengthy), at least one half the length of your paper should represent the “review” aspect of your topic. Your paragraphs should ideally cite more than one reference per paragraph (especially in the “review” section)and illustrate comparison and synthesis of ideas and facts from different sources. Papers should incorporate frequent use of in-text citations(after any fact or idea that is not your own, and should be used at the end of every sentence rather than only once at the end of a paragraph. Citations should use APA format and proper APA citation for references in the bibliography.
Use your own words for your writing; final proposal will be turned in via Canvas and will utilize TurnItIn, the university’s plagiarism detection software. A TurnItIn “exact match” score of greater than 25% for a final proposal will be given zero for the assignment, so please re-phrase all information in your own words. Please do not use direct quotes in this assignment.
