Inf1-CG Assignment 2 general
feedback and advice
Choice of review materials
Most people did not have a problem with this, and chose relevant
papers. Many of you even used additional references to provide more
information about prosopagnosia, face inversion, expert object
recognition, etc. This is great! A few people tried to use
textbooks or review papers-- these are not original sources and
thus not an appropriate choice. Look this up if you need
clarification about what is and is not an original source. However,
sources like textbooks or encyclopedia articles are great for
providing background information, such as “what is visual
agnosia?” and you should feel free to use them in that
way.
Content and organisation (in rough order of importance)
1. Putting the ‘review’ in research review
- A literature review is not a summary, it is a discussion of
work. It will summarise work from a particular paper (or area
of inquiry, in a large review) but this is essentially evidence for
a discussion of how this research goes about answering some
question, and whether it succeeds, conclusions that can/cannot be
drawn, comparisons to other methods... Without this discussion and
assessment, it is just a summary, not a review!
- Here is a verbatim excerpt from the assignment 2 instructions:
“The purpose of a literature review is to assessthe
published work pertaining to a particular topic....Writing a
literature review is not simply a matter of listing papers and
opinions, nor of summarizing papers one after another. The
reviewer’s job is to try to evaluate and to make sense of
what is out there—how do these papers relate to one another,
more specifically than being generally about the same research
area?” [emphasis added]
- Some students did a great job of assessing the papers in their
review and making connections between them, or even to additional
material. Keep up the good work! Another group of students seem to
have given analysis a try, but what they included was too short,
superficial/in not enough detail, or appeared as a few sentences at
the very end rather than being integrated into the papers. This is
far better than nothing, but lots of room for improvement. The last
group...seem not to have read the directions which are reproduced
above.
- Saying “more research is needed” is like
politicians saying “change is needed”: obvious and
basically meaningless.
- Why do you think that more research is
needed?
- Which specific questions remain unanswered, or which
current findings are not accounted for by current views and
theories?
- And for the ambitious...how might you suggest answering those
questions?
- Saying the equivalent of “this is not a convincing
explanation” is like the previous point. Why not? What is
unexplained, or who else's theory is explaining it better?
2. When you get to a key point or piece of information, such as
a hypothesis or critical finding, some of you tend to quote the
authors directly rather than re-stating these points in your own
words with a subsequent citation (paraphrasing).
- This says two
things: either you do not quite understand these points, or you are
not confident of your ability to correctly explain them in your own
words.
- Quoting can't be a substitute for understanding! If you think
you can hide your confusion...you can't. The more complex the
material, the more apparent this is.
- It is almost always better to try to re-state key points in
your own words than to quote! Other disciplines may encourage
quoting... this is not one of them. Many research reviews at the
professional level may not have have quotes at all, or very, very
few (5 or less) in a large paper.
- The general rule in scientific writing is to avoid using quotes
except when the original authors' words are so concise, insightful,
wise, or even witty that you could not possibly improve upon them.
You may also quote if you are essentially using those words as
evidence to support a claim, or challenging the authors'
conclusions, and the exact wording is important.
3. What actually happened in the experiment?
- The assignment clearly asks you to discuss how the authors
investigated their hypothesis, and what participant group(s) and
method(s) they used to do so.
- It is an insufficient level of detail to say that participants
were trained to become experts or that someone built a
computational model. For instance, if you discussed Gauthier and
Tarr (1997), you should definitely have discussed their method of
training Greeble experts versus novices! If you discussed a paper
with a model, it would have been good to say something about how
the model was trained as well.
- A few papers said something like “The authors used the
same methodology/stimuli/type of training as in paper X.”
This is fine...but only if you also discuss paper X as a part of
your review, or elaborate on the methodology in some way.
4. Overall flow of your paper
- You, as the reviewer, can do a lot to make your reader's life
easier. A main part of your job is to organise the material in the
most logical way (see assignment 2 website re: narrative). This is
possibly the hardest part of the whole review!
- Try to integrate topics and ideas as much as possible,
rather than pages and pages on one thing before switching back to
the other thing. This was especially important for this paper,
which was really intended to be about the intersection of
Greeble research with some other topic of your choice.
- Do not use technical terms or jargon without defining
them.
- What counts as technical may vary with your audience, but for
this assignment you definitely needed to define Greebles,
neurological conditions like visual agnosia, prosopagnosia, and
autism, brain areas (FFA, etc.), expert recognition.....there is a
long list.
- Define your terms in-text, rather than like a list. Your paper
is not a dictionary!
- Throughout your paper, make connections back to your overall
research question or theme, if you can. If you can't...ask
yourself if your material or commentary has strayed too far from
what it it supposed to be about! Do not assume that the
connection will be obvious to your readers. It probably is
not.
5. Introductions
- Your intro is not a table of contents! Tell us about the key
concepts we will encounter in the rest of your paper, and how they
relate to one another. Do not list paper titles.
- Try to mention the main concepts that your paper will discuss
and how they relate together. This way, readers have a roadmap for
what is coming. Look at the introductions of research papers for
help with this-- there is almost always a short, very general intro
paragraph before they get into the background literature.
6. Conclusions
- A conclusion is just that, a conclusion. It should be summing
everything up! This is not a place to introduce new information or
squash in your analysis. All of that should have been done already,
in the body of your paper.
- What you should include (copied directly from assignment
2 website!): Re-state your review’s theme and any general,
key points; Re-state your review’s "findings”
- Make sure to connect back to the topic of your review, or its
research question/hypothesis!
7. Transitions
- Most people were missing transitions entirely, and simply
abruptly stopped talking about one area, skipped a line, and
started another.
- For those of you who tried to transition...Rather than
saying something along the lines of “here is
another paper” please help your readers more by telling us
the relationship between the two sources or studies. Does the new
paper or study extend the findings of the first one? Contradict the
findings? Is this next part of the paper something different
entirely, such as your conclusion?
Writing style and mechanics (in rough order of importance)
1. Reference and comparison words
- When using comparison words like more/less greater/fewer
better/worse, you must be clear about exactly what comparison you
are making. More what than what other thing? Better than
what, in what way?
- Especially when using terms like better, it is important
to specify what your assessment criteria is. Especially without the
original paper to hand, it is bewildering to read something like
“participants did better in condition 2.”
- Also beware of articles like this, that and it.
Make sure that the object of your reference is always clear
especially if you are introducing a new topic or new material, and
ask yourself whether it might be better to spell the word out in
full. Your readers are just average readers, not mind readers.
Words like these work better when you are already in the middle of
a discussion or explanation, and the object is clear from
context.
- This was a very noticeable problem for most students.
Everyone does it once in a while, but for some of you this made
your papers very difficult to read.
2. Pronoun use and abuse:
- This is formal, academic writing.
This is not your blog. Do not use “I” or “we,
” or write that “In my opinion...” Don't
rely on opinion-- show us your evidence from the original research
as to why a claim is convincing or not convincing, methodology is
bad, or findings are incomplete.
3. Defining key terms:
- Do a check-- have you used technical
terms, concepts, or jargon that your audience will not be familiar
with? Remember here that our audience has some basic knowledge
about vision and memory, but NO specific knowledge of Greebles or
the other focus topics. This was clearly stated on the assignment 2
page. Thus, all of these topics and any other specialist terms
needed to be defined in your paper. See the Goldstein and Baddeley
textbooks for good examples of defining terms in-text.
4. Use of the word “proved” in relation to a
hypothesis or theory
- Hypotheses are not proved. Theories are not proved; it is
logically impossible. They can be confirmed or supported, or
conversely they may be refuted, unsupported, undermined, or
contradicted, or proven false according to the rules of logic, but
they are never proved. See a research methods textbook for
more information about this.
- Furthermore, theories are rarely called seriously into question
on the basis of only a few sets of results such as the tiny sample
examined in your reviews-- they must consistently fail to be
supported.
5. Titles are a necessity, not a formality.
- They are
important for telling readers what will be in your paper! Try to
strike a balance between informative and concise. Think of
“keywords” which describe your paper, and try to use
those to create your title.
6. Terminology related to participant groups
- “Persons with autism” not
“autistic”, and also “persons with
prosopagnosia” (or dyslexia, agnosia, whatever). You
may have read papers that say autistic or prosopagnostic, but the
current accepted terminology is to always emphasise the
person, not the condition they have.
- “Participants” is preferable to
“subjects,” unless the experiment uses animals rather
than people
7. General style notes
- Either indent paragraphs, or leave a blank line between them,
but not both<./li>
- Number your pages.
- Try to use italics, single- and double-quotes
consistently. Avoid ALL-CAPS, instead use italics for
emphasis, sparingly.
- Cut the fat! There were lots of filler phrases, wordiness, and
waffling. This suggests either that you are unsure of what you are
saying, or have not taken the time/effort to edit.
- Beware of run-on sentences! A run-on sentence is the
grammatical disaster that occurs when two complete ideas which
should be separate sentences are joined by a comma, or simply
mashed together with no punctuation at all.
- Comprehensibility check: If you read one of your sentences
aloud and have no idea what it means, or you run out of breath in
the middle, how do you think anyone else will possibly understand
it?
References
- Every source which is quoted, paraphrased or cited in your
paper for any reason must appear in the References section.
This is true for any academic paper in any discipline.
- Reference section must contain adequate information to uniquely
identify sources! Need year of publication, journal, publisher (for
books), etc. See the course web page for assignment 2 for links
to sources about correct referencing.
- Please do not include the title of the papers in your
paragraph text, or the journals in which they were published.
That's what the reference section is for. Use authors and year
only-- again, see an official source for the reference style of
your choice.