Hello everyone,

It was great to see some of you today at BioBlitz, I hope that you all had some fun and enjoyed the gorgeous weather this weekend. More importantly, I hope that you can now get a feel for what it means to collect scientific data, and that while not always glamorous, scientific research often draws upon many hundreds of data points, of which you are a small part. Think about how the skills we’ve already discussed in class, and especially the science senses, figure into what you did this weekend.

I’ve gotten a couple questions about tomorrow’s Hot Topic presentations, so I just wanted to clarify a couple things:

  • Your presentation can take any form you like. In past years, students have used PowerPoint, Google Slides, or just talked their way through an expanded version of their ePortfolios post.
  • You should focus mainly on how well the popular media report represents the primary source scientific article. Some other things to keep in mind: who wrote the popular media report? What is their job? What other things do they usually write about? Are they a dedicated science reporter, do they have degrees in science, etc.? Does the popular report make a conclusion where there is only a suggestion or possibility in the primary article?

Finally, a couple points regarding your citations as listed on the blog posts:

  • MANY of you did not put the year immediately following the author. This is very important. Again, we are using Chicago Style with author-date format, which means that all references should begin with the author followed by the date. This will allow your readers to quickly find the correct reference when they encounter an [author] [date] parenthetical citation. What this looks like, for a NY Times article:
    • Chang, Kenneth. 2018. “Water Droplets Don’t Just Hover on a Hot Pan. They Roll.” New York Times, September 14, https://nyti.ms/2NbtIDz.
    • In my text, when referencing this article, I would write (Chang 2018) and it would be easy to find this in my list of references.
  • Do not just use the “Cite this article” or “download citation” or “cite” feature on many websites. While these will often include much of the information, the formatting might be wrong, or it might include unnecessary information such as the search engine or aggregator used (e.g. EBSCOHost or Elsevier, neither of which you need).
  • Please make sure that you’ve used a short link, preferably a permalink or DOI, for your articles. If you go to an article through a search engine or get referred there from another site, often the URL will contain a lot of characters that specify this. It makes the URL get very long and unwieldy, very fast. A lot of these include symbols such as = ? & and other similar one. If there is a DOI listed, use that. If not, look for a “sharing” link or a “Permalink” button and use that. This is what it looks like on the NY Times website, for example: