Geog 442 critical bibliography guidelines: Dr. Rodrigue, F/2008

A critical assignment in this class is the preparation of a critical bibliographic essay. You might look on this as the preparation of a mini-course in directed readings, in which you fashion a reading list and then teach yourself about some aspect of biogeography of interest to you.

The bibliographic essay will cover at least five sources (though more are certainly welcome). Of these, at least four must come from "refereed journals," that is, from research journals that practice "peer review" in the selection of the articles they publish. The other source may include textbooks, chapters in anthologies, newspaper articles, articles in non- refereed (usually popular) sources (e.g., National Geographic, Time, Smithsonian) web pages, government sources, monographs, theses and dissertations, and talks at professional meetings. If you are a graduate student, you are expected to do more: You need at least eight sources, of which at least six must be from refereed journals.

Refereed journal articles can be found through bibliographies and reference lists in other journal articles, textbooks and anthologies, and, often, from materials published online. A good way to get into the literature is to check out a textbook in the subject in which you're interested and then go to the back and look for the kinds of journals that appear frequently in the reference list. Then, go look up relevant articles in those journals in the library (or ask for those articles through interlibrary loan, if we don't have it). While you're in the library, browse through recent issues of those journals to get an idea what's being published on your subject matter in the journals most like to publish such subjects. This part of library research can get very addicting (and tangential).

Now that you have read various popular or background pieces and have found at least four articles in the research literature, you need to prepare the reference list. Please use the following format:

Arrange the list alphabetically by author's (or lead author's) family name.
If it's a journal article, you'd use this format:

Jones, C. 2002. Article about an interesting creature in the Black Lagoon. Journal of Some Pretty Interesting Plants and Animals 14, 2: 235-239.
That is, author family name first. Comma. Initial(s). Period. Year. Period. Article name in sentence format (capitalize first word and proper names/place names). Period. Name of Journal (with all major words capitalized and the whole journal's name italicized) no period and no comma volume. Comma. Number (if more than one issues appears each year). Colon. Page numbers. Period. And use hanging indentation (where the first line begins at the far left margin and the reference wraps into an indented block.
If it's an article in an anthology (and I'll use three authors this time):

Jones, C.; Smith, J.D.; and Gonzalez-Sanchez, M.T. 2000. A chapter about plants in the majestic Los Angeles River. In Title of Book about Cool Things to Know about Riparian Vegetation, ed. O.L. Ling and M.N. Ndebele, pp. 45-62. New York and Los Angeles: Arcane Publishing House.
That would be last name comma initial(s) of first author. Semi-colon (so you don't get confused with the commas within each author's name). Last name comma initial(s) of second author. Semi-colon. And Last name comma initial(s) of last author. Period. Year. Name of chapter in sentence case (only first word, proper names, and place names start with capitals). In italicized name of book with all major words capitalized. Comma, pp. page numbers. Period. Name of city or cities in which book was published. Colon. Name of publishing house.
If it's a book, it comes out:

Sandhu, C.M. 2001. A Book about the Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati. Columbus, OH: Vanity Press International.
That is: last name. Comma. Initial(s). Period. Year. Period. Book title with all important words capitalized. City (and state or country if you suspect your readers don't know where Columbus is). Colon. Publishing House.

Now that you have your five sources (including your refereed journal articles) neatly arranged in your word processor, you need to compare and contrast the information in them about the subject in which you're interested. Compose an essay, about three or four pages long (not counting your actual reference list), in which you discuss the trends in your topic as conveyed by your readings and then show where each of your articles agrees or disagrees with another or others. Very importantly, your essay needs to make a specific connection between each entry and one or more of the others or else to the class itself.

For example, let's say you were reviewing an article about fire regimes in California which argued that fire regimes have not changed in Southern California for thousands of years based on the size and frequency of fires reported there in the historical record. Let's say, further, that you had just read some other article that said that fire regimes in Southern California must have changed after the arrival of U.S. culture there because of the difference in fire frequency and vegetative land cover along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Your discussion of each article would refer to the other and note that they seem directly to contradict one another, perhaps based on the different data they use to approach the problem. What I'm trying to get you to do is read these articles critically in light of other articles you've read on the subject.

Having done all that, how would you rank the four research articles, separately, in terms of:

the data collected
the methods applied to the data
how logically the evidence is used to support the basic argument

Now that you've ranked the four articles on these three axes, which one seems to you to be the most convincing and best done? Which one seems to be the most interesting to you personally and why?

Geography 442: Biogeography

Bibliographic Essay Guidelines

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