Neurosci. 500 Feedback on Critiques for All Students from T.H. Murphy

Neurosci. 500 feedback on critiques for all students from T.H. Murphy

Oral presentations: Keep on time, rehearse your presentation several times and make sure you that you can do it within the time allotted. Also, make sure that you arrive early in class and if you are working with PowerPoint, save your file in as a PowerPoint version that is compatible with Office 2000 and 2003. When speaking, do not read directly from notes, note cards can be used to keep you on track, but a presentation that is read often does not have the same impact as one from your head. Look directly at the class and do not be nervous. These are your classmates. There is no reason to be anxious about the presentation, it is something to look forward to. As mentioned for the written critiques, these papers are long and complicated, your job here in the oral presentation is to simplify it and to do this, you will present a small subset of the total data. Again, as in the written critique, it is important that you find hypotheses, which may not be explicitly stated. To help your presentation focus on cartoon-like figures and only present a subset of the original data. Perhaps, crop figures and add additional labels to make it easy for audience to navigate.

General feedback on written/oral critiques: Follow directions on the website we have clear description of what should be done. Make sure you include a numbered responses to each of the points. A well- organized critique will make it easier to mark and will ensure that your good points come across clearly. In general, when write your critique, avoid copying anything directly from the paper, the best critiques are written in relatively simple language by the students themselves and it is often obvious when a student has merely re-written some of the material from the paper. These papers are typically much too long and complicated to be able to find key phrases and recite them back.

2. Summary. Please don’t just paraphrase the paper abstract, try to summarize what is requested in point form including the experimental problem hypotheses results and conclusions. This summary is really a summary of your critique, not necessarily the paper.

3. Experimental problem. Here you need to give a bigger picture reason for why people are studying this particular area and why it is important. Do not give results or try to find the right sentence from the paper that fits this particular point. This exercise will require you to read the paper and to somehow distill what you believe the experimental problem is.

4. Hypotheses. Hypotheses are rarely explicitly stated within the paper, they are often implied or based on knowledge of the experimental problem. So, finding the right hypotheses will involve some creativity and assessment of the larger literature around this paper (you will need to consult other papers). When stating the hypothesis, make it clear and state what the hypothesis is. Many people fill in this section without adding the word hypothesis.

5. How are the hypotheses tested. Here focus on logic and a sequence of experiments. Not every experiment needs to be outlined. Details like which species the antibodies are raised in and salt concentrations are entirely inappropriate. Include a brief summary of results in presenting how the hypotheses were tested, it is difficult to follow a list of methods without results or conclusions. Concentrate again on the big picture and logical flow. Many of the papers are extremely complicated with many different arguments and results. You need to distill out the key results, which address the hypotheses that you have derived from the paper. Again, this is not always easy since this material will not be laid out for you within the paper, you need to distill it.

6. Do the experiments fully address the hypotheses. Here we would like to hear your opinion not necessarily a copy, paste, and re-write from the author’s discussion. If you have an older paper, it would be nice to hear how this work has held up over the years and where the field is gone. If you have a newer paper, it would be nice to hear how the results fit with the past literature. For the best critiques, we would like to hear your own big picture take on the paper, not a potential control that was missing and outlined for a particular reviewer.

7. Future experiments. You can get creative here and we really want to hear your opinion, not the experiment regarding an antibody and different species or a small point that the authors are outlining in their discussion for particular reviewers.