20.109(S14):NHEJ system research article

Overview

The culminating assignment for Module 2 will be a research article in which you describe your systems engineering investigation. The term research article (as opposed to laboratory report) is meant to indicate your growing maturity as scientific writers, and our growing expectations of you. While your Module 1 assignments contained many of the same elements that you'll include here, the research article will be a more complete, cohesive, and formal document. Your Module 2 paper should approach the quality of the primary scientific literature (excepting its lack of experiment repetition), especially with respect to explaining rather than merely documenting your observations. For more information about research articles vs. laboratory reports see here.

Logistics

Method of Submission

Please submit your completed report on Stellar, with filename FirstName_LastInitial_LabSection_Mod2.doc (for example, Raphael_R_TR_Mod2.doc). Late assignments should be submitted on Stellar as well.

You will complete this assignment individually. Please review the 20.109 statement on collaboration and integrity as you proceed.

Date of Submission: April 23rd

The final draft of your research article is due by 5 pm on April 23rd (Wednesday) for everyone.

Note that there is no lab Tuesday or Wednesday that week.

Formatting Expectations

• Your main document (excluding figures) should be/have
  • .docx (preferred) or .pdf
  • 12-pt font
  • with 1-inch margins
  • double-spaced (excepting the abstract)
• Figures can be made in a separate drawing program (such as powerpoint), and should be submitted as .pdf

Guidelines on Length

REVISING THIS PART LAST

Not counting figures, report length should not exceed 12 pages. The following rough division is recommended:

Please take the following guidelines with a grain of salt. Because we are teaching a brand-new module, we necessarily can only estimate the requisite section lengths. You will not be penalized for going modestly over a section limit if you are being thorough yet concise. Conversely, you might technically stay within a section limit yet use more space than your content warrants, which would lower your evaluation.

• Introduction: 2-3 pages
• Methods: 2-3 pages
• Results: 2-3 pages
• Discussion: 3-4 pages

Concise writing is appreciated and rewarded! In other words, longer is not always better.

Content Guidelines

Begin by reading the general guidelines for scientific writing. A few notes specific to Module 2 are below:

Introduction

Results and Figures

Discussion and Citations

This section should realize all the good practices described in the Module 1 assignment in regards to concisely stating conclusions about your research, but do so at a more advanced level. You will be expected to cite the broader scientific literature more thoroughly than before, both to set up your investigative question in the introduction and to inform your analysis in the discussion. You should also propose specific future experiments and otherwise show that you deeply understand the meaning and significance of your results; for example, if you have a hypothesis about why a DNA topology had the relative repair frequency that it did, consider what follow-up experiments you might try. Also, make sure to do a bit of literature digging to determine if your results have any precedent or if your experiments are contrary to what has been reported. Modest speculation as to why that it the case is highly encouraged. The best scientific writers are creative in their discussion sections – convincing their readers that whatever the results, the study was interesting and contributes to forward movement of the field. In addition to drawing conclusions from your own data, you are expected to spend some time considering your classmates’ data. Here, you do not need to include ALL the data from the class. Only the data that contributes to the story that you want to tell.

Evaluation

The full descriptive rubric for lab reports can be found on the guidelines page.