The world is awash with scientific papers. Even if we restricted a survey to research within biological sciences, I guestimate that there are more papers published each month than your average academic could be expected to read in a lifetime. In these rich fields of information, how are students unfamiliar with the genre to develop [...]
But is it any good? An information literacy tutorial
At the Higher Education Academy STEM conference in April 2012, I presented a poster offering an outline into a blended-learning tutorial we have produced in order to help undergraduates develop their abilities to evaluate the academic merit of different resources they might find on the internet. The tutorial involves the students working individually to critique [...]
Helping students improve their referencing practice
Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive. Colleagues and students may therefore be [...]
Why is the site called Journal of the left-handed biochemist?
The name of the blog has its origins in lectures I give on referencing for university assignments. Not surprisingly, undergraduates sometime struggle to recognise that papers published in certain journals are deemed more worth that articles appearing in ‘lesser’ publications. To avoid potential offence to any particular periodical I would stress that “An article appearing in Nature [...]
