DEDUCTIONS

Question - What sort of article, exactly, am I looking for?

First, make sure that you are looking in the right place. Science magazines are good sources, but may be much more technical than you're ready to handle. You want something that you'll be able to understand. "Hard news" magazines or newspapers can be good, too - anything that should be a reliable source for science information. Once you have a source, make sure that any article you might pick is long enough - it's got to have at least one full page of text - and that it is about biology in some way - in other words, it deals with the workings of living things.

Question - How do I know if I’ve got an appropriate website?

First, check the address - anything with a long address with a bunch of slashes in it is not a main site, but a subsite - find the main site by looking for a "HOME" link or by "peeling back" the address by deleting parts after a slash - work your way back slash by slash until you’ve hit what’s obviously a main website. Then, make sure that it’s biology-related and check - usually near the end somewhere - to see that it was updated this year.  Then you must figure out who put the site up - who wrote it?  Is there a good reason to think that the person or organization would be a reliable science resource?  If you can't find any real information about the writer(s), even if references are cited, don't use the site.

Question - So this is like, some sort of report?

No, it's not like anything you've probably written - the closest assignment to an abstract would be the first part of a book report, where you're very briefly telling what the book is about. An abstract is about article content and coverage, not a report about the subject of the article. You also don't get to editorialize - your opinions about the article are irrelevant in an abstract.

Question - How much do I need to tell?

Not much. It's as if someone looked over your shoulder as you were reading and asked, "What kind of article is that?" Your answer would be brief, but a good answer would let the person know the basic theme of the article and all of the major points it covers, so they could tell if it was something they might want to read. Keep it short - you don't need to really explain things, just mention the main theme and any well-covered subjects.

Question - Are there any "tricks" to writing a good abstract?

There are many different tricks. What you want to do is break the article down to "the bare bones," and that can be done by outlining, or by making notes on a photocopy, or by reading and then waiting before you write (that last one is tricky). One definite trick is to use the checklist on the first handout page - if you can check everything off, you'll get a good mark.

Small, Meredith F. 1997. Our babies, ourselves. Natural History, 106(9), pp 42-51.

This article is about how caregiving for infants varies among cultures. Many contrasts between hunter-gatherer cultures and western cultures are given. A brief retrospective of how anthropological studies in this area have changed in focus appears. All of this is integrated into the biology of newborns, in such areas as nutrition and bond development. The suggestion is made that western rearing techniques may be ignoring the cues that come from the babies themselves. Several sidebar articles by other authors accompany the main article - subjects in the sidebars: practices among the Gusii people of Kenya; the rest-centered approach of the Dutch; teaching pediatricians to deal nonjudgmentally with varied approaches in different ethnic groups; effects of different approaches on crying; how long to breast-feed; and effects of parents sleeping with babies.

Rome, Lawrence C. 1997. Testing a muscle's design. American Scientist, 85(4), pp 356-363.

This article reviews the research done by the author connecting the design of a muscle system with the system's particular function. After a brief introduction to muscle mechanics, examples from frog jumping, fish swimming, and toadfish vocalizing are examined in some detail.

This British site, allied with several other major sites with links on the homepage, calls itself the "guide to history of medicine resources on the Internet." It has mainly a search function in this field, but it also offers a "Browse by Category" option with the categories "Diseases," "Electronic publications" (sic), regional breakdowns, miscellany, "Education & research," by periods of history, "Medical speciality & technique," "People," and "Science & technology." Each category offers major reference sources and many subcategories as well. There are many sources that are modern, rather than historical.