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Section 4

Peer Review Comments

Bio 112, Peroni

Peer Reviewer ________________________ Writer: ________________________

Lab _________________________

Instructions: Confine your comments to this sheet; do not write on the draft itself. Review the guidelines for peer review of writing assignments included in the Honor Code section of your syllabus. I will evaluate you on the basis of the biological knowledge you display in your review and your ability to detect major organizational or logical problems in the draft report. Your evaluation will not be influenced by the quality of the writer's first or second drafts. Consult chapters 4 and 10 (pp 167-175) in McMillan for general scientific writing guidelines and sample lab reports. Copies of McMillan are on reserve. You should also consult the lab report checklist before you complete this assignment.

Carefully tear out these sheets and staple them together before you turn in this assignment.

Title - The title serves as an advertisement for the paper. List any terms that the author should include or omit in order to make the title succinctly, but accurately reflect the nature of the project.

Introduction - The introduction should: clearly state the question the project addressed, provide background information that explains how the project relates to existing knowledge, and briefly indicate the research approach used (e.g., "We used cellulose acetate electrophoresis of the Lap locus to investigate this question.").

1. Provide a one sentence description of the author's question based on your reading of the introduction.

2. Provide a brief (two to three sentences maximum) summary of the author's explanation of how this project relates to existing knowledge.

3. Assess how clearly and correctly the author states the question and if the background information provides the reader with a good justification for the research.

4. List any information that the author should incorporate into the introduction or exclude from this section.

Methods - The methods section should allow the reader to repeat the experiment without consulting the author. However, if the author followed a published protocol, it is acceptable to simply cite that protocol and not repeat all that information in the report. Editors allow this practice because it saves printing space. They reason that anyone who wants to repeat the study can obtain a copy of the published protocol so long as it is correctly referenced and any deviations from that protocol are clearly explained.

1. If you wanted to repeat this experiment, what questions would you have to ask the author in order to compensate for information he/she failed to include in the Methods section?

2. Make a brief outline of the methods section (e.g., seed collection and germination; extraction, loading and running the gel, staining the gel, scoring; data analysis). Note if this outline really reflects the order in which you actually accomplished each task during the lab, or if you would need to rearrange the outline if you repeated this experiment.

3. Did the author write this section in the past tense (i.e., a narrative account of what was done) or in "cookbook" tense (i.e., "Take 4 drops of .....")? The narrative, past tense approach is the appropriate one.

Results - The results section usually consists of two parts: the text and the figures/tables. In the text portion, the author states trends in the results and notes if those trends are statistically significant (e.g., "The caffeine treatment group's mean change in systolic blood pressure was twice as large as the control group mean, and that difference was statistically significant."). You then use figures or table to provide the appropriate descriptive statistics (e.g., means, standard deviations, percentages). Note: the author should provide only the appropriate descriptive statistics, not every piece of data collected. A table is any list of numbers or words. A figure is any graph, photograph, drawing, or map.
The results section should not include any interpretation of the study's findings. However, information on the outcome of a statistical test is considered a result, not

aninterpretation. For example, comments such as "The mean for the caffeine treatment was greater than the mean for the control, and this difference was statistically significant (t=24.3, df = 19, p < 0.0001)." belong in the results section.

1. List the trends identified by the author. For each trend, indicate if the author designated it as statistically significant and note which table or figure presents the descriptive statistics that correspond with that trend.

2. List any important trends that the author forgot to include in the report or any trends that are not supported by data in a table or figure.

3. Space is a precious commodity for publishers, so the author should present the same data once and only once. List any situations where the author presents the same data in more than one format (e.g., means and standard deviations presented in both a table and a figure, or presented in a table or a figure and in the text).

4. Identify any instances where the author provides interpretation of the results.

5. Figures and tables should: be easy to interpret, provide the appropriate descriptive statistics (e.g., mean, standard deviation, and sample size), and include legends. A legend consists of one to several sentences that provide the reader with the information necessary to understand the data presented by the figure or table. Ideally, a well written legend should allow someone to understand the results displayed by the figure/table without reading the text of the report. Table legends are placed above the table (at the top of the page). Figure legends are placed below the figure (at the bottom of the page).
Note: Tables and figures that do not supply the units of measurement used and figures that lack axis labels are not easy to interpret.

Identify any figures or tables that are difficult to interpret and note how the author could improve them.

Discussion - In this section, the author should return to the question he/she posed in the introduction and use the results of the study to answer that question (e.g., "We cannot conclude that the caffeine dose in a single cup of coffee influences blood pressure in college aged subjects, since we found no significant difference in blood pressure between the caffeinated and decaffeinated treatment groups."). The author should compare his/her findings with those of similar studies and offer possible explanations for any differences between the current study's results and those of the other investigations. The discussion section is also used to make suggestions for future research.

In one sentence, summarize the author's conclusions. Note which results support each conclusion.

Literature Cited - Citations in the text and references in the literature cited section should follow the name-year (Harvard) style (consult Chapter 6 in McMillan for guidelines and examples). Note any deviations from these conventions.

Sentence Structure - Read several paragraphs aloud. If the sentences tend to be overly long and confusing, transcribe one or two of the problem sentences. Then, edit these sentences to make them more clear and succinct.

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