Biology 533 - Plant Structure and Function

Spring 2003 Semester - Project
Project: Annotated Bibliography. The goals of this project are to learn how to carry out scientific literature research using the internet and to write concise summaries of the information presented in journal articles. The technology for information storage and retrieval has advanced dramatically in the past few years and this is an exciting resource just waiting to be used. The project consists of an annotated bibliography of an anatomical topic of your choice but approved by me before you begin (examples of topics include: medicinal plants, plasmodesmata, stomata, drought adaptations, trichomes, anatomy of a specific plant group, etc). This entails reading/skimming twelve articles from peer reviewed journals (e.g. American Journal of Botany, Economic Botany, Nature, Science, Systematic Botany), with not more than two articles written by the same primary author (although that same author can be a secondary author on other articles) and obtained from at least three search sources (e.g. Agricola, sciencemag.org, JSTOR, nature.com, etc).

For each article, a brief summary of 5-10 sentences should be written in your own words, not merely cut and pasted from the internet. These summaries should discuss the purpose of the study, the methods and results and can include your own comments.

This project is worth 25 points. Total points will be awarded for correctly formatted citations and accurate, well-written summaries. I will be spot checking the citations! Points will be taken off for incorrect citation format (pay attention to the punctuation), unalphabetized lists, scientific names not underlined nor italicized and not enough citations. This sounds nit-picky, but when one submits a paper to a journal for consideration for publishing, the journal expects their format to be followed. I am using the Systematic Botany citation format.

If there is interest, I am willing to show people how to search for and read abstracts/articles on the web. In most cases, you will not need to obtain a hard copy of the article: it is available on-line. In addition, I prefer to receive the project as an attached MSWord document by email.

This project is due Monday, May 12 at 5 pm, no exceptions and no late projects will be accepted. It can be emailed to me (jhedin@sciences.sdsu.edu) or left in the envelope outside my office (LS121).
Useful websites:

JSTOR

Science magazine

Nature magazine

Agricola
These images are copyrighted by Dennis Kunkel at www.DennisKunkel.com, used with permission.
page last updated:
21 January 2003
Citation examples:
Journal article:
Simmons, M.P. and J. P. Hedin. 1999. Relationships and morphological character change among genera of the Celastraceae sensu lato (including Hippocrateaceae). Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 86:723-757.

Book:
Gentry, A.H., Ed. 1990. Four Neotropical Forests. Yale University Press New Haven, Connecticut
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