Overview
Your task is to find a peer-reviewed journal article about Antarctica and write a 200-word summary. The journal article can cover any Antarctica-related topic: climate, geology, oceanography, ecology/biology, glaciology, politics, geography, historical/modern exploration, and so on. You are free to explore any topic that interests you so long as the academic journal article focuses on Antarctica.
How to find an article:
Here are two easy pathways for finding scholarly journal articles.
Option 1:Google Scholar (scholar.google.com). If you log in to google scholar using your UCSB account, you will find that many articles are available to you. This is because UCSB has institution-wide subscriptions to many prominent research journals. Any article showing [HTML] or [PDF] to the right of the article (shown in blue boxes below) can be instantly viewed/downloaded
Journal Article Requirements!
- Please choose an article published within the last 10 years.
- Review articles (scholarly articles that summarize recent research in a given field) are acceptable.
- To be clear, you are not tasked with finding a news article. Be sure to find published, peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.
Deliverables:
A 200-word summary of your journal article
Your summary should include:
- A title. Something like “Summary of [article title] by X”
- A full citation of your journal article in the APA style. For example:
Clarke, A., Barnes, D. K., & Hodgson, D. A. (2005). How isolated is Antarctica?. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 20(1), 1-3.
Author(s)Year publishedArticle titleJournal nameVolume/Edition + page #s
- Within the body of your summary, please include:
- 1-2 intro sentences outlining the general topic of the article.
- After giving the general topic of the article, state the research question and/or goal of the study. What are the authors trying to achieve? Why is it important?
- What method(s) are the authors using to answer their research question(s)? Don’t worry if you don’t fully understand the methods being used, but try your best to follow the logic of their study.
- The major findings/conclusions of the study. What is the takeaway message?
- At the end of your summary, briefly share why you chose this article. Does the topic align with your academic interests? Do you have any past experience with the topic? Did you just think it was cool?
- Summaries must be submitted online as a PDF in the Writing Assignment #2 dropbox in the week 7 module. The assignment is due Friday, Feb 28 at 11:59pm
You will be graded on:
- The content of your summary. Is your summary faithful to the journal article? Can I, or the TAs, get the major takeaways of the article from your summary? Credit will be deducted if your summary is confusing, incomplete, or contrary to the article. Know that we will be reading the abstracts of the articles you choose, and if your summary is plagiarized from the abstract, you will receive a 0.
- The quality of your writing. Please, please, please proofread your work. Points will be deducted for grammatical errors and incomplete/illogical sentences. Please remember that good writing is concise writing. Keep things simple, clear, and direct. Don’t use flowery phrases to increase your word count.
- Word count. Summaries that significantly fall below the word count will be penalized. If you can’t think of anything else to say, consider finding a new article with more information. There is no penalty for exceeding the word count.
The use of AI (ChatGPT, etc) is not permitted on this assignment. We will screen assignments suspected of AI-contributions. You will receive a zero if any of the text in your assignment is linked to an AI author.