ESM 4234: Mechanics of Biological Materials and Structures Fall 2012
Homework - Literature Summary
1. Find a scientific journal article to read and analyze. It needs to be related to the course material from the week’s lectures. You can find articles directly from the required readings from the week, or by searches on databases such as ISI Web of Knowledge or Google Scholar. It must be a research article in a reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Reviews are not applicable. [Other places to look: troll journals that publish the most biomaterials work. These include Journal of Experimental Biology; Biological Macromolecules; Biopolymers; Journal of Biomechanics; Bioinspiration and Biomimetics; Science; Nature; Nature Materials; PNAS; PLOS.]
2. Read it closely.
3. Write up your analysis. It should be a stand-alone document that a reader who has not read the paper can understand. It should place the research in a broader context and hopefully make someone who reads your summary want to pick up the original article to learn more. You should use complete sentences, proper grammar, and transitions from one paragraph to the next. It will include the following information:
a. List the full citation in the format of the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Auhtor(s) Name. (Year). Title of Article. Journal. Volume, Page#-Page#.
Take care when downloading a citation into a reference manager that it grabs all authors and page numbers (sometimes you don’t get it all..)
b. What was the article about? Give a short (3-5 sentence) summary in human, understandable language. Don’t just copy their abstract.
c. What hypothesis did they allege to test?
d. What was the main technique, tool, or method that they used?
e. What were the main results?
f. Did they convincingly test the hypothesis?
g. Based on what they did (or did not do, or did poorly), identify one unanswered question that remains.
h. Briefly devise/describe an experiment that would answer your question.
i. Do a forward citation search on ISI Web of Knowledge. How many papers cite this paper, and more importantly, do any of these papers address your question?
4. Submit your write-up along with a pdf version of the paper in the Scholar dropbox. If it’s an older article, scan it!
Upon completing these assignments, you will be able to:
· Search the primary scientific literature using Google and online scientific databases to find the articles that are most relevant to your interest
· Critically evaluate scientific studies and clearly articulate a summary of their goals, results, and broader significance
· Generate a hypothesis and propose a method to test it
Page 1 of 1