Bio 436/536 – Animal Behavior
Fall 2009
Review Papers
Reading about behavior and putting your understanding into words might be the most
effective way to learn about animal behavior. Writing well is also one of the most
valuable skills you can take out of a college education. So for Animal Behavior each
student will write one paper, due midsemester, that summarizes current understanding of
an area of animal behavior. The papers will be based on primary, peer-reviewed
published research. The papers will be about 6-8 pages long, will cite at least 10 peer
reviewed sources (20 is fine if that makes your paper better). It’s important to me that
you write the best paper you are capable of writing (partly because I will be reading them
and I truly enjoy the good papers, not so much the bad ones). So I am going to give you
considerable guidance below and in person in choosing a topic, conducting your research,
and putting together a professional quality review paper. I’m going to draw heavily on
the teaching efforts of several colleagues, especially Patti Loesche, Phillip Stoddard and
Gary Ritchison. They’ve all given me permission to borrow, and I do so freely.
What is a review paper?
Some of you may not be familiar with the term. Your goal is to take a particular topic
and review (summarize and critically evaluate) the relevant literature. You want write a
concise and complete summary of what is known about a question.
What makes a good topic?
This is important! A good topic is one that is current (people are interested in the
question and actively doing research on it), manageable (not so broad that you can never
master the literature surrounding it, nor so narrow that you can’t find sufficient
literature), and interesting to other people, and especially to you. A good topic makes a
paper that is satisfying and easy to write, a poor topic makes a successful review
impossible.
As P. Stoddard points out, you can often
…work up and down the chain of breadth until you find a topic which works, e.g.
Parental care
Parental care in vertebrates
Parental care in aquatic vertebrates
Parental care in fish
Parental care in teleost fishes
Parental care in cichlid fishes
Parental care in Rift Lake cichlids
Parental care in the cichlid genus Haplochromis
Parental care in the cichlid Haplochromis burtoni
Note that you won’t really know if you have chosen a suitable topic until you have done
considerable library research and you know how much and what has been published on
the topic. Start early! You may be surprised how low on the “chain of breadth” you’ll
have to go. Almost all students start with too broad a topic. For example, the topic “song
learning in birds of in the order passeriformes” has probably had enough articles
published on it to keep you reading for most of a decade, full time. You want something
you can master a little more quickly than that, so you’d need to narrow it to “social
influences on song learning in sparrows during their first year.”
Here are some ideas for topics. You are welcome to come up with your own topic. No
two students can write on the same topic.
From P. Stoddard:
Sample review paper topics
• Brain differences in song learning
• Social influence on song learning
• Single genes and behavior
• Influence of social behavior on body function
• Learning and development of simple behaviors
• Sex differences in memory and use of space
• Neural control of sex or aggression in the golden hamster
• Brain maps and behavior
• Masculine behavior and morphology in female hyenas
• Relation of sexual selection by predators
• Regulation of worker behavior in honeybees
• Learning, memory and foraging
• Mechanisms of global orientation in migratory animals
• Neuroendocrinology of territorial behavior
• Nest parasites: why, how, development, evolution
• Limits on evolutionary arms races between predators and prey
• Evolution of female preference for male signals
• When are signals honest?
• Overt vs. covert sexual selection
• Why and how females choose the sex of their offspring
• What do females gain by extra-pair copulations? A review of theory & data
• When animals choose mates for “good genes”, what do they really get?
• The latest on leks
• Re-analysis of parent-offspring conflict
• Reversed sex roles – when males are choosy
• How mammals recognize their relatives
• Coerced vs. voluntary cooperation among relatives
• Critical tests of evolutionary theory in human behavior
From Gary Ritchison: see the suggestions at
http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/BehavEcol-topics.htm
G. Ritchison’s suggestions include 2-6 suggested articles to get you started.
Note that the best topics are not along the lines of “Behavior of the Manatee;” instead of
a particular animal, they focus on a major question or theme.
It’s often useful to focus your topic around a question (see some examples in the list
above), but other topics that seem rather bland and “descriptive” like “Mating behavior in
guppies” or “kin recognition in rodents” will make good topics if you can cover both the
topic at both proximate and ultimate levels: think how and why. How do rodents
recognize kin, and in what ways is that beneficial to them?
You will be responsible for handing in a proposed topic by Wednesday, October 7. By
that time you should have done considerable searching of the literature (you should have
15 to 20 articles located on your topic, even if you haven’t read and digested all of them).
What sources are suitable?
Peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. The bulk of the sources you cite should be
from the primary literature – they should be reports of original research (these will have
methods and results sections). Reviews are articles from peer-reviewed journals or books
which summarize research done by others. Reviews can be very useful when you're
learning about your topic. But reviews are "secondary" sources, and you should still have
at least 7 articles from the primary literature.
I found great information on a website. Can I use it and cite the website as a
source?
No. Websites are not peer-reviewed the way scientific journals are. If the information is
reliable, it came from a published source. Find the published source and cite it instead.
If there is no published source, there is no way of knowing the information is reliable.
How do I find articles?
Working out from a paper.
One of the best strategies is to find a recent article on a topic that interests you, and work
outward from there. The library gets Animal Behavior, and other behavior journals (see
list below) have online tables of contents you can browse – go browse through the tables
of contents of a few issues, looking for articles that seem interesting. Read the abstracts
if the titles look good. If the abstracts hook you in, read into the article itself. The author
of the article should cite important related papers in the introduction and discussion
sections. Get those articles and read them.
Search engines:
All of these search engines available through Kimbel Library’s web page are good for
articles on animal behavior:
Science Direct
BioOne
JSTOR
PsychInfo
Web of Science
The web of science is particularly powerful and allows you to look for all the papers that
have cited a particular article, a very useful feature.
Also, Google Scholar can be very useful – if you find a promising article through Google
Scholar, go to Kimbel Library’s page, click on Journal Finder and type in the name of the
journal to see if you can get the article online, off the shelf, or will have to order it
through interlibrary loan.
Some journals that include articles on animal behavior
Animal Behaviour
Behavioral Ecology
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Behaviour
Ethology
Ecology
Nature (general science journal, as are the next two)
Science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
American Naturalist
Auk (birds)
Condor (birds)
Journal of Comparative Psychology A.
Trends in Ecology and Evolution (reviews)
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics (reviews)
Trends in Neuroscience (reviews)
Interlibrary loan and xeroxing cost money – do you really expect me to have hard
copies of all these articles?
Digital copies are OK, but see the next note below.
The article is available online as “full-text” – that’s what I want, right?
Actually, you should avoid these online “full-text” versions like the avian flu – keep
poking around and you will just about always be able to find an option to download the
original article as it appeared in the journal (same type font, same figures, same layout,
same everything). These are always in .pdf format. That’s what you want. The “fulltext” versions sometimes lack figures, and the figures are the most important part of
many papers.
OK, I have an approved topic and 25 articles. How do I actually write the paper?
I’m going to turn this over to the experts – I’m including a handout from the U.
Washington Psychology Writing Center that gives better directions than I could. Do
what they say, except you can ignore the details on bibliographic format. Instead follow
the examples at the end of this handout.
Does it really matter if I punctuate the bibliography like the handout says?
Yup. All it takes is a little bit of effort to get it right.
How do you grade our papers? What exactly are you looking for?
CONTENT:
- do you have appropriate, peer reviewed sources?
- How many such sources do you use?
- How much depth of information did you use from the sources? It’s better if you
report how each study was conducted and what the results were, not just the
conclusions.
- Do your sources tie together into a coherent whole?
- Is it clear what information came from which source?
ORGANIZATION
- Does the introductory paragraph introduce the question or topic of your paper?
- Do the middle sections report information in enough detail?
- Are the middle paragraphs sensibly arranged (one topic or example or theme per
paragraph)?
- Topic sentences are an excellent way to start each paragraph! (Your english
composition teachers really do know what they're talking about).
- Does your paper summarize and evaluate? Your job is to evaluate the research, not
just report on it, and especially towards the end of the paper, your position or
opinion should be clearly stated.
WRITING
The criteria for good writing are harder to describe in this small space! Get a copy of
Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” and read it. But some of what I’m looking
for includes:
- Clarity (this isn’t poetry – the clearer the better when writing about science)
- Your own voice coming through
- Correctly formatted references
- Lack of typos, correct spelling and grammar
- Clarity. Worth saying twice.
What is due when?
I guess this is kind of buried in the middle, but you’re reading the whole handout, right?
October 7: paper topic
- 5 points
October 21: bibliography
- 10 points
October 28: Annotated bibliography and outline
- 15 points
November 11: Review Paper 70 points
It will take me most of two weeks to read and grade all the papers. After I hand them
back, you will have the option of rewriting to improve your grade (the new grade replaces
the old grade, for the 70 points that come from the final paper only).
Is it worth the effort to rewrite a paper for a better grade?
Some rewrites are terrifically improved from the original version. However, I usually get
other rewrites that have only minor changes – the student went through the paper,
corrected only where I marked a particular word or sentence without making any
fundamental changes. Trivial change in paper = trivial change in grade. If you look at
the written comments I make and do a substantial rewrite, you may get a substantial
increase in the grade.
Format for paper topic and bibliography, and format for citing sources in your
review paper.
Follow these formats for handing in your paper topic and bibliography:
Topic:
[your topic here]
[your name here]
[today’s date]
Bibliography :
[your topic here]
[your name here]
[today’s date]
Bibliography:
Adkisson CS, 1981. Geographic variation in vocalizations and evolution of North
American Pine Grosbeaks. Condor 83:277-288.
Reibel K, 2000. Early exposure leads to repeatable preferences for male song in female
zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
B: Biological Sciences 267:2553-2558
Beecher MD, 1996. Birdsong learning in the laboratory and field. In: Ecology and
evolution of acoustic communication in birds (Kroodsma DE, Miller EH, eds).
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 61-78.
Catchpole CK, Slater PJB, 1995. Bird song: biological themes and variations. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Note the following:
1. Bibliography is alphabetized by last name of the first author. (do NOT reorder the
names within an article. First author stays first author).
2. The first entry is a journal article, the 2nd is a chapter in an edited book, and the third
is a book. Note the format and use it EXACTLY.
3. The first line is OUTDENTED. Do not do this with tabs. Instead, adjust the margins
at the top of the window of your word processor to indent subsequent lines (or in
Microsoft Word, use the “format paragraph” window, under the “format” menu.
4. Capitalization, or rather the lack of it. Some electronic databases capitalize the title
or authors. You should not.
5. Use of initials in the authors’ names.
6. Minimalist punctuation.
7. Year of publication follows authors.
When you write your paper and poster, you should cite all your sources in the text in the
following (“author-date”) format:
Geographic variation in bird song often results from learning in the first year of a bird’s
life (Adkisson, 1981; Beecher, 1996; Catchpole and Slater, 1995; Dennett et al. 2003),
but Stevenson (1999) found ususual stereotypy in parid song across an entire continent,
suggesting a reduced role for learning in the chickadees.
The first two are single-author papers, the third paper has two authors, the “et al.” in the
fourth one indicates at least three authors. If you name an author in a sentence, use the
last name only and follow the name with the date of the publication to which you’re
referring.
Every source cited in the text should appear in a Literature Cited section at the end of
your paper or poster (and every work in the Literature Cited section should be cited in
the text). The Literature Cited section should be in the same format as the sample
bibliography above.
Annotated bibliography:
Same format as bibliography, but should have a paragraph after each citation,
summarizing what you found pertinent about the article. Your goal is not to repeat
exactly what’s in the abstract, but to note for your own use how this article fits into the
question or topic you’re addressing with your overall review.
Outline
A paragraph by paragraph outline of the points you intend to make in your paper, and the
articles you will cite to support your points.