TERM PAPER GUIDELINES
As noted in the grading portion of the syllabus, one of the requirements of the course is that you do an individual paper based on a behavioral topic of your choice. The purpose of this is to acquaint you in depth with a small part of behavioral biology that may be of some interest to you and also to give you some experience in scientific writing. The grade on the paper will reflect the diligence with which you researched the topic, the depth and quality of the scientific content, grammatical quality, and scientific writing style. For examples of scientific organization, style, and referencing procedures in review papers see any issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology or any review paper in the annual reviews series (e.g. Ecology and Systematics, Genetics, Physiology, etc.). For reviews specifically related to behavior see Recent Advances in Behavior or the Perspectives in Ethology series.
Textbooks and review volumes present broad areas of knowledge summarized somewhat superficially. Thus, as much as possible, given our local library, I expect you to go to original journal literature for your data and ideas in these papers. A bibliography containing almost nothing but book and review references will lower the paper a half-grade. You can use these books as starters, but not as a primary source of material.
This paper would be classed as a science review paper and, as such, should follow the norms for scientific literature; do not use the norms that you might have been given for such papers in history, English, etc. The differences are especially noticeable in the citations (no footnotes at all, no endnotes, use only author and year citation in the text, etc). Consult review papers in any primary journal listed at the end of this handout for pointers in organization, style, referencing procedures, etc. If you still have question, feel free to consult with me.
Although you are summarizing original literature in some area of the behavioral sciences, I expect you to write the summaries in your own words. Use of clause/sentence length or longer direct quotes will result in a reduction of a half grade on the paper. The magnitude of the reduction will be greater if there is blatant overuse of quoted material. Use of quoted material that is not surrounded by quotation marks and referenced appropriately is a form of plagiarism. See below for my treatment of plagiarism in a paper.
All of you must consult with me regarding the topic of your paper. I expect that this will be done sometime before March 1. If you are confused or unsure of a topic, you can check with me for advice. In any case, consulting with me is a requirement; failure to do so will result in a reduction of a half grade on the paper.
On average, I would expect the papers to be ~10-15 pages in length. This is no hard and fast rule though. They can be as long or as short as you like, as long as they cover the material adequately and in depth and don't get overloaded with verbiage. The rule is that the paper should be just as long as it needs to be to say what needs to be said in a concise manner.
Below are some suggested term paper topics. The list is not exhaustive, and you are free to pick any topic of a behavioral nature you want. Most of the topics below are quite general in nature. It is up to you to narrow them down for a specific paper. Scan your text for other subject areas that you may find of interest.
Possible topics
1. Historical development: mechanistic and reflex schools of thought, origins of ethology, behaviorism, Skinnerian thought, some aspect of the nature/nurture controversy, ethology and comparative psychology today.
2. Behavior genetics: Mendelian crossing using behaviors as traits, artificial selection on behavioral characters, hybridization, measurements of heritability, human twin studies, intelligence controversies.
3. Physiology of behavior: sensory behavior - e.g. physiology of various sense organs, stimulus filtering and responsiveness to stimuli, central nervous processing, behavioral decision making. comparative studies of animal sensory capabilities (Umwelts) relative to their environments and lifestyles. the nature of motivation, drive, consciousness, memory, sleep, etc. the coordination of complex muscular activity. biological rhythms. Navigation and orientation. habitat selection.
4. Ethological principles: innate motor programs, what is an instinct, releasers and sign stimuli, supernormal releasers, fixed action patterns, appetitive-consumatory behavior. An ethogram type description of the behavioral repertoire of some species or species group. Behavioral tendencies, tendency conflict, conflict resolution, display evolution, ritualization.
5. Learning: the neurological basis of learning. Habituation, conditioning and other forms of associative learning, latent learning, insight, imprinting, imitation, reasoning. The nature of reinforcement. Genetic constraints on learning. The question of animal awareness, animal culture, cultural transmission of knowledge, cultural evolution.
6. Topics in communication: communication modalities and the structure of signals relative to use and environment, cooperative or selfish use of signals, pheromones, human nonverbal communication, evolution or ontogeny of communication systems in various taxa, human language development.
7. Behavioral ecology: adaptiveness or evolution of feeding strategies, aggression, prey defense strategies, reproductive strategies, sexual selection, kin selection, mating strategies, social organization in any animal taxon. Human sociobiology controversies. Parental investment. mating system evolution.
8. Scan your text or other texts in the library for topics that might
be of interest to you.
U of S Library - Behavior and related journals present:
Journals exclusively concerned with original behavior literature:
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Behaviour
Brain, Behavior and Immunity
Hormones and Behavior
Animal Behaviour
Journal of Insect Behavior
Behavioral Ecology
Journals having a good proportion of original behavioral papers:
American Naturalist
Ecological Monographs
Ecology
Annals of the Entomological Society of America
Evolution
Journal of Animal Ecology
Journal of the New York Entomological Society
Physiological Zoology
Southwestern Naturalist
Edited/Review Volumes that are helpful include: Quarterly Review of Biology, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Advances in Ecological Research, Perspectives in Ethology, Current Ornithology, Avian Biology, Social Insects, Cold Springs Harbor Symposia, Oxford Reviews of Evolutionary Biology. Since papers in these volumes are largely review papers, these volumes may be particularly useful to you in seeing how such scientific review papers are written and in obtaining extensive citations of original literature that you could reference. Keep in mind that papers in these volumes are not considered original literature.
Searches on the Web in general are not recommended because there is often no way of knowing whether the information you are getting is the result of legitimate science or just the idle ramblings of your typical web idiot.
There are means of searching original web literature on the Web though. Probably the easiest way to get into them is to go to the Weinberg Memorial Library's biology research page, http://matrix.scranton.edu/academics/wml/databases-subjects/biology.shtml, and get links from there. Any web citations used as references in the paper must be references to some primary literature online. Use of web citations that reference Wiki, newspapers, popular magazines, other student papers, other professor's class notes, or any other non-primary source of information will result in an automatic deduction of a half grade; if I feel the use of such material is a substantial part of the paper, I will deduct a full letter grade.
Plagiarism of any sort will not be tolerated in your paper. If,
upon reading your paper, I suspect any plagiarism, I will scan and submit your
paper to turnitin.com for analysis. Turnitin.com is a service that
compares your writing to anything that exists already on the web or in its own
extensive term paper files. If the analysis shows any plagiarism, I will
deduct 2 full letter grades off the paper.
ON THAT DATE I EXPECT TO RECEIVE A HARD COPY OF THE PAPER FROM
YOU; ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED.
YOU NOW HAVE 3 MONTHS NOTICE OF THIS DEADLINE.� I WILL ACCEPT NO EXCUSES FOR NOT MEETING
IT. ANY PAPERS HANDED IN AFTER THIS TIME WILL RECEIVE A REDUCTION OF ONE
FULL LETTER GRADE. IF THE PAPER IS MORE THAN 2 DAYS LATE, A DEDUCTION OF
2 FULL LETTER GRADES WILL BE IMPOSED.