<commit_before>---
layout: pagetrimnobio
title: "Advanced Topics in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology :: Syntheses"
tags: [about, Jekyll, theme, responsive]
modified: 2014-08-08T20:53:07.573882-04:00
comments: true
---

[< Back to Course Page]({{ site.url }}/teaching/advtopicsecoevo)  
[> To Course Schedule]({{ site.url }}/teaching/advtopicsecoevo/schedule)

## What are Syntheses?

During this course, each student is expected to turn in 7 syntheses, covering the range of topics that we explore (see schedule). 

Structure:  
1. A summary sentence that summarizes a *key concept* from a particular Topic.
2. One example *per peer-reviewed paper* that we read in class that supports the summary sentence.  
3. One example from an external peer-reviewed paper (that you find yourself) that supports the summary sentence.
4. Two sentences that detail the implications of these observations/statements.

Rules:  
1. Strict adherence to the structure defined above is mandatory.  
2. Sentences should be grammatically correct, clear, and concise. Because there are so few sentences for each topic, each one has to be well-constructed and focused.  
3. You must include a **Literature Cited** section at the bottom of each Synthesis. Use the format detailed by the journal [Evolution](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/15585646/homepage/forauthors.html#4)  
4. Turn in Syntheses ***in PDF form*** in Canvas ***before class on the due date***   


## What is the point of Syntheses?

Synthesizing concepts and ideas in short and concise statements is incredibly important when writing a scientific paper. A paper -- where you are presumably communicating a new idea, concept, data, or theory -- must be built on a framework that places your contribution in the context of a larger problem or set of problems that scientists are interested in solving. To do this, we must summarize and synthesize prior work to motivate our own contributions, and we generally must do this in as few words as possible while still maintaining clarity (this is particularly true if we are trying to publish our work in a high-impact journal with strict page limits). Therein lies the goal of these Syntheses assignments: to train your writing style to be clear, concise, and powerful in communicating the *essence* of a paper. This is harder than you think! To quote <NAME>: *I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.* Spend time on these syntheses - it takes a lot of practice to extract the most important messages of a paper and articulate these messages into a small number of words and phrases, but it will pay off when you sit down and pen the Introduction to your submission to *Science*, *Nature*, *PNAS*, or whichever journal you plan to send your killer paper.

## Examples of Syntheses
* **Topic 1:** The rate of proliferation of a particular trait in a population is determined by a complex interplay of extrinsic (environmental) and intrinsic (biological) variables
    * **Example 1:** Carroll and Boyd (1992; Evolution) showed that different populations of soapberry bugs rapidly adapted to divergently shaped fruits of recently introduced non-native host plants over a period of ca. 50 years; high genetic variance and relative isolation among soapberry bug populations allowed for such high rates of differential selective shifts.<commit_msg>syntheses<commit_after>---
layout: pagetrimnobio
title: "Advanced Topics in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology :: Syntheses"
tags: [about, Jekyll, theme, responsive]
modified: 2014-08-08T20:53:07.573882-04:00
comments: true
---

[< Back to Course Page]({{ site.url }}/teaching/advtopicsecoevo)  
[> To Course Schedule]({{ site.url }}/teaching/advtopicsecoevo/schedule)

## What are Syntheses?

During this course, each student is expected to turn in 7 syntheses, covering the range of topics that we explore (see schedule).  

Structure:  
1. A summary sentence that summarizes a *key concept* from a particular Topic.
2. One example *per peer-reviewed paper* that we read in class that supports the summary sentence. If there are no peer-reviewed papers assigned to a particular topic, replace with an external peer-reviewed paper (that you find yourself).  
3. One example from an external peer-reviewed paper (that you find yourself) that supports the summary sentence.
4. Two sentences that detail the implications of these observations/statements.  

Rules:  
1. Strict adherence to the structure defined above is mandatory.  
2. Sentences should be grammatically correct, clear, and concise. Because there are so few sentences for each topic, each one has to be well-constructed and focused.  
3. You must include a **Literature Cited** section at the bottom of each Synthesis. Use the format detailed by the journal [Evolution](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/15585646/homepage/forauthors.html#4)  
4. Turn in Syntheses ***in PDF form*** in Canvas ***before class on the due date***   


## What is the point of Syntheses?

Synthesizing concepts and ideas in short and concise statements is incredibly important when writing a scientific paper. A paper -- where you are presumably communicating a new idea, concept, data, or theory -- must be built on a framework that places your contribution in the context of a larger problem or set of problems that scientists are interested in solving. To do this, we must summarize and synthesize prior work to motivate our own contributions, and we generally must do this in as few words as possible while still maintaining clarity (this is particularly true if we are trying to publish our work in a high-impact journal with strict page limits). Therein lies the goal of these Syntheses assignments: to train your writing style to be clear, concise, and powerful in communicating the *essence* of a paper. This is harder than you think! To quote <NAME>: *I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.* Spend time on these syntheses - it takes a lot of practice to extract the most important messages of a paper and articulate these messages into a small number of words and phrases, but it will pay off when you sit down and pen the Introduction to your submission to *Science*, *Nature*, *PNAS*, or whichever journal you plan to send your killer paper.

## Examples of Syntheses
* **Topic 1:** The rate of proliferation of a particular trait in a population is determined by a complex interplay of extrinsic (environmental) and intrinsic (biological) variables
    * **Example 1:** <NAME> Boyd (1992; Evolution) showed that different populations of soapberry bugs rapidly adapted to divergently shaped fruits of recently introduced non-native host plants over a period of ca. 50 years; high genetic variance and relative isolation among soapberry bug populations allowed for such high rates of differential selective shifts.
{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.05803830528148578, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014509576320371444, 'mean_word_length': 4.599512591389114, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 8, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 8, 'https://': 2, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '4506928', 'n_tokens_mistral': 1786, 'n_tokens_neox': 1617, 'n_words': 1013}