Biology-Article Decoding

The Scientific Method: decoding the primary literature

After you have read the Discovery magazine article :  "Seven Deadly Sins" by Kathleen McGowan, you can begin this assignment.  Several different primary literature articles were cited throughout this popular press article. There are links to the pdfs of three of these scientific journal articles.  Choose one of these scientific articles (above) and decode it to discuss each part of the scientific method: 1. Observation - what observations are the researchers basing their experiments on, what prior studies do these researchers cite? 2.  What is their hypothesis? 3.  How did they conduct and control their experiments? 4.  What conclusion did they reach? 5.  Did this conclusion help support or reject their hypothesis 6.  What further studies need to be conducted to further the understanding of this phenomenon?