Special Programme in Science

Task 4 | Research Problem & Bibliography

Instructions

what you have to do

Declare a clear research problem to be used for Task 5 (and possibly for Tasks 6).
— This should ideally be based on your experience with Task 3.

Create a comprehensive bibliographic list of 30 – 50 articles relevant to your research problem.

— You do not have to read the whole of all the articles in the list. Just their abstract and conclusion will suffice at this stage.
— You can have only three (or less) review articles in your list.
— The list needs to be in the form of a table with the following headings.

	Article	Source	Search Statement	Authority of Source	Justification
	1%	0%	2%	2%	2%
E.g.	Citation of the article in APA format.	The source of your information.	The statement you used for the search.	Any parameter to indicate authority. Impact factor, H-index, No. of citations, Sponsored database	State how this article is relevant and worthy of being part of your list.
1	Lykos, P. (2004). Modeling the Hydrogen Bond within Molecular Dynamics. Journal of Chemical Education, 81(1), 147. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed081p147	Google Search	`hydrogen bonding + molecular dynamics`	Journal of the American Chemical Society	Discusses a new approach to understanding hydrogen bonding

This task will contribute 5% to your final score.

delivarable

A single PDF file with your research problem and your bibliographic list.
1. Please use this file as a template.
Please submit a PDF document to the LumiNUS folder Task 4.
- Name the file task4_a1234556b.pdf, where ‘A123456B’ is your matriculation number.

dates

Begins : 6 pm, Mon 5 Oct
Ends : 8 pm, Sun 7 Nov
Work on this task along with Task 3.

why are we doing this?

Give you practice to carefully and methodically identify, reliable sources that will help you get acquainted with your chosen field and the current state of the art related to the field.
You will also realise that your research problem can be refined and revised to be better and more up to date.
This is also the starting point for your final report for 71. You will use this research problem in Task 5 and hopefully recruit others to work on your research problem for the final 71 report (Task 6) next semester.

note

Make sure you refer to the rubrics.
As always, please ask us if you have any queries.

Rubric

Quality of the Research Problem (2%)

We will assess the quality of the research problem as follows:

Criterion	POOR	Mediocre	Good	Excellent
Research Problem (2%)	Research problem missing or convoluted and uninterpretable.	Research problem overly general, superficial, or contrived.	Research problem is wordy, ambiguous, or unclear.	Research problem, clear and precise and focussed.

Quality of the Bibliographic List (3%)

We will select ten entries from your list at random. These will be assessed using the following criteria (indicated are the relative weights).

Criterion	POOR	Mediocre	Good	Excellent
Formatting (10%)	Not in APA format. The citation contains many errors.	In APA format with several errors.	In APA format with a few errors.	In APA format. No errors.
Search Statement (15%)	Search statement not provided.	Simple broad, unfocussed statement. Poor use of proximity operators.	Uses proximity operators to build a good search statement which can be improved to be more focussed.	Uses proximity operators to build a deliberate, focussed search strategy.
Authority of Source (25%)	No justification provided.	Authority of the source is suspect. Justification is poorly presented.	Authority of the source is clear. However; the justification is poorly presented.	Considers multiple indicators (e.g. no. of citations, journal impact factor, author provinces, citation trends, sponsored databases). Provides a clear, concise justification of the reliability of the source.
Justification/Relevance (50%)	Insufficient justification. The article is not relevant.	Article is relevant. No justification.	Article is relevant, but the justification is not clear.	Clear and precise statement of relevancy.