BIOL3144L Guidelines for writing a module report paper

The module report papers in this class are required to follow the format and conventions accepted for publications in scientific journals. We will follow the format of one of the top journals in the field of ecology, which is called Oikos. Please stick to this format and all the details of it; you will be graded on the form as well as on the content.

As a condition of taking this course, all required papers may be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin software for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. No student papers will be submitted to Turnitin.com without a student’s written consent and permission. If a student does not provide such written consent and permission, the instructor may: (i) require a short reflection paper on research methodology; (ii) require a draft bibliography prior to submission of the final paper; or (iii) require the cover page and first cited page of each reference source to be photocopied and submitted with the final paper.

The papers could be submitted either as a printout (white paper, letter size, stapled) or as a single MS Word or .pdf file via e-mail. Irrespective of the form of submission, the paper should be in my office no later than 4:50 pm on the due date; problems with the e-mail server will not be accepted as a valid excuse for a missed deadline. Therefore, if you choose e-mail submission, it is your responsibility to make sure that your e-mail has reached me on time. If you don't have a confirmation that I have received your paper by 5 pm on the due date, it means I don't have your paper and you have missed the deadline. The bottom line: if you have any doubts about the reliability of your e-mail connection, use paper submissions.

The papers should be typed using 12 size font, using a standard typeface such as Times New Roman, Arial or Courier, spaced 1.5-2 throughout, with at least 1 inch margins. Sections 1 through 8 from those listed below must be included in your paper, section 9 (Appendices) is optional.

Sections to be included:
1. Title page
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. Materials and methods
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Literature cited
8. Acknowledgements

An optional section:
9. Appendices

1. Title page. This is the first page of your manuscript, which must include:
                    Title of the paper. This should be a succinct (max. 40 words) description of your research and of the content of your paper. For example, "A comparative study of the nutritional loads in two urban lakes" or "The effects of habitat fragmentation on population size of the spotted salamanders" are good titles. Make sure your title is as specific and descriptive as possible; "A comparison of two ponds" or "A forest study" is not OK.
                    Name of the researcher (=you), affiliation (=UNC Charlotte) and contact coordinates (e.g. e-mail).
                    List of up to 10 keywords, which refer to the key concepts and findings of your study.

2. Abstract. This is the second page of your manuscript. The abstract represents a concise (max. 350 words) summary of your study and its main findings. Imagine an important person (for example, your potential employer interviewing you for a job) who needs to know exactly what your work was all about but has only one minute to learn about it. Write your abstract in such a way that this person would understand the goals of your study, the hypothesis and experimental design, the results of your study and their importance. Make it short, explicit and clear, and exciting enough to persuade this person to give you the job. Count the words in your abstract using the Word Count feature in MS Word (Tools→Word Count), and insert the word count below the abstract as follows:

The abstract contains  ......... (your word count here) words.

3. Introduction. This will be the third page of your manuscript where the main body of your report starts. This section gives background information on why this study has been conducted, why it is important and what are the study goals. This section should discuss the results of the previously published research on the topic of your study and to show how your study builds up on the existing knowledge and what is your specific contribution to this field. The last sentences of the introduction should state the objectives of your study and hypothesis/hypotheses which are being tested. Overall, the best way to construct this section is to go from general to more specific aspects: start with a general ecological concept you are studying, describe results of the earlier published research pertinent to this concept, and then state your specific objectives and hypothesis explaining how they relate to the general concept. The statement of the research objectives and hypotheses will create a good transition to the next section, which is Materials and Methods.

Rules for in-text citations: Introduction, as well as Discussion, are the two sections where you most often cite results of previously published research. In doing so, you should abide by the following rules of in-text citations.  If the paper or the book you cite has one or two authors, they should be mentioned by their last names, followed by the date (year), when the paper was published. If the paper has three or more authors, you should give the last name of the 1st author, followed by et al., and then by publication year. For example:

"As was shown by Smith (1925), oxygen concentrations in the Nowhere Lake are lowest during the summer months".
Or:
"In the Nowhere Lake, dissolved oxygen concentration is the lowest during the summer months (Smith, 1925)".
Another example:
"In contrast, dissolved oxygen in the surface waters of the Triecks estuary significantly declined in the winter (Wart et al., 1998), possibly due to the high discharge of fertilizers into the Triecks river (Wart and Smith, 1999)".

Please avoid using long direct quotation from the published papers; instead, read the paper and present its main ideas in your own words. Don't forget to include citations; even though the words are your own, the ideas are someone else's, and this someone should be properly acknowledged. Remember that using direct quotation of more than 3-5 words in a row from someone's writing without quotation marks is plagiarism (even if you stick the author's name somewhere in the same sentence), whereas using long direct quotations with quotation marks is bad style. Therefore, unless a direct quotation is absolutely necessary (e.g. you are citing someone's definition of a term and want to give it literally) do not use it. If it is absolutely necessary, put it in the quotation marks and include the reference and the page number at the end of it.
For example:
Among numerous definitions of ecology, Krebs (2001, p. 2) defines ecology as "... a scientific study of the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms".
Or:
"Ecology is a scientific study of the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms" (Krebs, 2001, p. 2).

 Remember, that you only need to indicate page numbers for direct quotations, not for the regular in-text citations.

4. Materials and Methods.  In this section, you should describe methodology of your experiments and observations. This section should be detailed enough to allow another person with basic skills in ecological research to replicate your study. Please avoid the cookbook style in your Materials and Methods section. This section should be a cohesive narrative of the steps you undertook in your study, not a list of instructions. In writing this section, you should assume that the potential reader has taken this course before and has the same basic skills as you have after completion of this study, but may not have necessarily conducted exactly the same experiment. So your job here is to explain step by step what you did and how you did it while avoiding unnecessary details. For example, it is unnecessary to write: "We submersed the oxygen probe of the YSI Oxygen meter so that the openings on the probe were completely covered with water, waited until the reading was stable and recorded it". Instead of it, you should write: "Oxygen concentration of the surface water was measured using a YSI Oxygen meter, model 200". Please make sure that you describe statistical methods you have used to analyze your data, at the end of this section. As in the case of experiments and observations, do not include unnecessary information in the description of your statistical methods, which is a common knowledge among scientists (e.g. there is no need to explain when you reject the null hypothesis and when you accept it, or how you compare the value of t-statistics obtained in your test with a critical value from the table). In this section, your important role as a writer is to decide which information is required and necessary and thus should be included, and which should be omitted.

5. Results. This section should concisely and fully describe the results of your study but should not attempt to interpret their meaning (this is reserved for discussion). Data presented in this section should represent summary data (graphs and tables including mean values and standard deviations, regression lines, correlation coefficients, etc.) but not the raw data! If you wish to present the raw data, they can be added in the last section, Appendices.

The text of the Result section should concisely state the results of each experiment or observation in your study, followed by the reference to a figure or a table, where the reader can check the data for him-/herself. For example, you may write: "In the Brocker Pond, dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration significantly decreased with depth until reaching its minimum at 8 m (Figure 1)". In this example, Figure 1 should show the actual DO profile with depth and include a statemnt as to the statistical significance of this decline. Make sure you state the results from all your graphs and tables in the text; there should be no loose, "orphan" data without textual description. Also make sure that you use the word "significantly" only if you refer to statistically significant differences or trends; do not use "significantly" as a mere synonym of "considerably" or "notably" to describe the changes in the data that you see with your naked eye but that have either not been tested for statistical significance or have been tested and turned out to be statistically non-significant.

Do not duplicate data presented in figures with the tables and vice versa. Each data set should be presented in only one form - either a figure or a table. Figures are the preferable form of presentation; please use them whenever possible. Avoid putting too many data sets on the same figure to avoid confusion; if the figure gets too busy, split it into two. If (and only if) the data do not lend themselves to a good visual representation, present them as a table.

Each figure and table should have a clear, concise caption. Table captions should be placed above the tables,  figure captions should be placed below the figures. Each caption should include a title (a brief description of the figure/table content), explanation of all the symbols used in the figure (e.g. "Empty circles - concentration of dissolved oxygen, mg/L; black triangles - temperature, degrees Celsius"), as well as other non-self-evident elements of the figure (e.g. if you include vertical bars to show variation of your data, explain  whether they represent standard deviation,  standard error or range of variation; if you use asterisks to mark statistically significant differences, state this and explain whether they show differences at P<0.05 or P<0.01, etc.).

6. Discussion. This is a very important section, where you tie your results with the previous published research, explain the meaning of your results and their importance.  Feel free to discuss the meaning of your results, compare them with your expectations and original hypotheses and with earlier published research. You can add here additional information from the published sources you've cited in introduction and bring in additional sources. However, do not simply re-state your hypotheses or repeat parts of the introduction. Instead, synthesize your data with the data of other researchers in a coherent, continuous text flow: make it into a story. 

Include a critical analysis of your data and those of other researchers; in case there are any discrepancies between your results and those from other studies, provide a possible explanation for it. This would also be a good place to discuss limitations of your research methods and experimental design, how they may have affected your results and how they can be overcome in future research. Suggest directions of the future research and new, improved approaches for this study.

Make sure that you understand limitations of your particular study and do not overstate your cause. Your findings are important and deviations of your data from the general pattern are interesting and worth discussing; however, such deviations do not necessarily overthrow existing ecological theories. For example, if you did not find any differences in dissolved oxygen concentration in two ponds with different temperature regimes, it does not prove that DO concentrations are not affected by the water temperature. Therefore, it's best to avoid too broad generalizations from your data unless they are well supported by published research elsewhere.

Cited research should be properly referenced in this section as well as in all others; for the format of in-text citations, refer to section 3 (Introduction).

7. References. This section should start with the header "Literature cited" and include all references mentioned in the text of your report. No extras should be included; if a paper is not mentioned in the text, it does not belong here. In the list of references , you should adhere to the format required by Oikos:

For a journal article:
Haila, Y. and Järvinen, O. 1983. Land bird communities on a Finnish island: species impoverishment and abundance patterns. - Oikos 41: 255-273.

For a book (including your textbook, if appropriate):
 Mayr, E. 1963. Animal species and evolution. - Harvard Univ. Press.

For a book chapter:
Goodall, D. W. 1972. Building and testing ecosystem models. - In: Jeffers, J. N. R. (ed.), Mathematical models in ecology. Blackwell, pp. 173-194.

Titles of journals should be abbreviated following Biological Abstracts (you may check here for approved journal abbreviations). If in doubt, give the title in full. Do not refer to unpublished material.
The list of references should be arranged alphabetically on authors' names and chronologically per author. IPublications by the same author(s) in the same year should be listed as 2004a, 2004b, etc. When more than three authors, write the three first followed by et al.
Points will be taken off for reference lists not conforming to this format.

8. Acknowledgements. This is a short statement (1 paragraph max.) where you can acknowledge assistance you have received from other people and organizations in conducting this research. Examples include thanking your team-mates for help with the data collection and/or people and organizations who gave you access to their property to conduct research, as well as the funding agencies who gave money to carry it out but exclude thanking your second cousin Jennifer and your favorite bullterrier Spot for the moral support during the study.

9. Appendices. This section is optional and can be included or omitted at your discretion. It may include additional information you consider helpful in understanding your research but which is too bulky to be included in the Results. Examples may include the raw data, maps of the study sites, descriptions of unusual or self-made equipment, etc.

Author: I. Sokolova 07/20/2006

NB: This advice is not always applicable to real research, and every now and then (not very often!) researchers come across the data that overthrow existing theories. However, even in those rare and far apart cases the researchers must make sure that their conclusions remain within the framework of their experimental data, must prove that there is no alternative explanation for the discrepancy between their results and the general theory. This is not likely to be the case in this class given the nature of the research we will be conducting.