Assignment

For this assignment, you will conduct a research paper on Climate Change and its affects on any organism, ecosystem, biological process or physical process (ex: atmospheric process, water cycle, nutrient cycling, etc.).

Students will develop a hypothesis regarding climate changes’ impact on your chosen topic (ex:Climate change has a negative effect on polar bear populations in the arctic).

Papers should be grammatically correct and clearly written.Please remember to provide references and citations.

NO PLAGARISM.

Page Requirement: 4-6 pages, double-spaced

Citations:Your paper should include in-text citation following APA format.

Title:This should be a concise description of your topic.

Introduction:

The introduction should provide background information on your topic.The bulk of your citations should be here.Also, your hypothesis should be clearly stated here.

Methods:

Here, you describe techniques and practices used to answer your questions.Since this is a literature review, you will discuss where and how you collected journal articles and other sources of information.

Discussion:

Here you will discuss the results.Were you able to answer your question?

References/In-Text Citations

The purpose of a list of references is to allow the reader to find out where you obtained your information so the reader can refer to the original document if desired.You need at least five separate references from peer reviewed journals for your paper.

References fall into different categories: peer-reviewed journals, popular journals, gray literature, and books.You will find the most accurate and technical scientific information in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Ecology, Science, Nature, etc.Your paper should have at least five references from a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. The author or authors who wrote the scientific paper sent it to the journal to be published.The journal then sends the paper out to other scientists familiar with the technical material in the paper to review.Only if the other scientists say the research is well done will the journal publish the paper, which is why they are called “peer-reviewed.”Such a paper will tell you how the information it reports was collected and analyzed besides giving the conclusions from the research.Each year millions of scientific papers are published in peer-reviewed journals.

The best way to access papers in peer-reviewed journals is to go to the WilmU library webpage.WilmU pays for internet access to hundreds of peer-reviewed journals.There are several good links then available to you.

Listing References (citations) in the Text

Within the text of your paper, you need to reference the source of all the information provided that is not original with you.You then attach to the end of your paper a “References Cited” section that lists all of the references you used.Do not list a source in the references cited section that you did not reference in your paper.

There are several ways to list a reference within your text.If the information applies to only on sentence, you generally list the reference at the end of the sentence in parentheses.You list the author followed by the date.A comma separates the author and date ( ex: Jones, 1999).