Guidelines for Biology of Aging Critiques.
Goal of Critique:
Choose an article, either from a popular magazine, newspaper, on-line ad or from the news. The article should deal with some aspect of aging. There are many “claims” in the popular media or from companies (such as cosmetic companies) about products that can slow or alter aging.
Your mission is to then use the scientific database pubmed to find at least 3 reference articles (ALL THREE must be peer-reviewed journal articles) that deal with the same subject matter and provide either evidence supporting the claim or refuting it.
YOU MUST GO TO http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ to get your peer-reviewed articles. Enter an appropriate search term into the empty text box then press search. The system will then search and provide a list of articles related to that topic. You will probably want to search several times with multiple search terms.
Click on an article title to see the abstract (short summary of the findings). You will then choose articles that are pertinent to your topic and obtain the entire article. The system will indicate whether the article is available for free. If possible, find those that you can immediately obtain at pubmed. If you want an article that costs a fee, DO NOT buy the article.
Instead, get all of the information and go to http://www.aacc.edu/resources/academic-services/library/ (Links to an external site.) and look in the section labeled “Borrow items from another library”, or use another appropriate article.
In your critique, your goal is to briefly summarize your approved critique article’s main concept THEN use data/information from your other reference articles to either support or refute the claims of the article you chose to critique.
The key to a good critique is to use specific data from the peer-reviewed references that you find to back-up your critique.
Type in your article title, links, authors, magazine or news source, page numbers if appropriate, year, month, publisher.
