Guidelines for the Pine Paper Summary

Your assignment for the March 11/13 lab meeting is to read and summarize an article related to the germination and growth of pine seedlings. You have each been assigned a paper to summarize; see the second page of this document which contains a list of all the papers and student ID’s, listed by lab section. Find your student ID, then click on the name of the author on that row. This will take you to JSTOR, one of the library’s electronic resource databases. You can then download a PDF copy of your paper by following the instructions on the JSTOR website.

Your summary for the pine paper review should contain the following elements:

  1. Citation – At the top of your summary, you should provide the complete citation for the paper you are reviewing. This citation should follow the format used in the literature citation section of a formal lab report or review paper.
  2. Observations – Provide a brief summary of the prior observations that motivated the study. These can typically be found in the introduction to your paper.
  3. Hypothesis being tested – Summarize the central idea being tested by the researcher(s). Again, this is usually found in the introductory section of your paper.
  4. Methods – Briefly summarize the experimental approach used by the researcher(s), focusing on the type of data they collected to test their idea(s), NOT the details of their procedures.
  5. Results – What did the data the researcher(s) collected tell them about their original idea?
  6. Conclusions – Given the information above, what conclusions did the author(s) reach?

Your summary should be no longer than 1.5 pages, double-spaced, with standard top, bottom and side margins. You only need to focus on the information in your article that relates specifically to pines. If your article contains information on other tree species, you do not have to include this information. In Chapter 6 of A Short Guide to Writing about Biology, Jan Pechenick (2004) provides an overview of how to write a summary of a research article if you need more help.

The summary is due at the beginning of the lab period on March 11 for those of you in the Tuesday Lab Section and on March 13 for the Thursday lab section. You should bring two copies, one to submit and one to discuss with your review group.

See next page to access the paper that you have been assigned:

Paper / Tuesday Lab Section / Thursday Lab Section
McQuilkin, W. E. 1940. The natural establishment of pine in abandoned fields in the Piedmont plateau region. Ecology 21:135-147 / # 000123640
# 000195916
# 000201235
# 000215097
/ # 000058337
# 000133059
# 000148795
# 000171826
Oosting, H. J. and P. J. Kramer. 1946. Water and Light in Relation to Pine Reproduction. Ecology 27: 47-53. / # 000216163
# 000222129
# 000228892
# 000236216
/ # 000175708
# 000177958
# 000212023
# 000219538
Kramer, P. J, H. J. Oosting and C. F. Korstian. 1952. Survival of pine and hardwood seedlings in forest and open. Ecology 33: 427-430. / # 000265374
# 000268444
# 000274452
# 000278389
/ # 000228877
# 000236818
# 000241888
# 000242006
Bormann, F. H. 1953. Factors determining the role of loblolly pine and sweetgum in early old-field succession in the piedmont of North Carolina. Ecological Monographs 23: 339-358. / # 000294344
# 000301037
# 000302520
# 000306291
/ # 000244849
# 000265382
# 000281197
# 000281253
Ferrell, W. K. 1953. Effect of environmental conditions on survival and growth of forest tree seedlings under field conditions in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Ecology 34:667-688. / # 000342411
# 000380930
# 000383753
# 000387555
/ # 000295063
# 000318847
# 000322912
# 000324141
Pinder, J. E. III, F. B. Golley and R. F. Lide. 1995. Factors affecting limited reproduction by loblolly pine in a large old field. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 122: 306-311. / # 000469452
# 000479602
# 000482737
# 000484365
/ # 000325502
# 000347305
# 000353931
# 000393329