How to Critique Paper
Paper Critiques- bring a print copy to class and upload to the assignment folder by noon, day of discussion
Format: Use Times New Roman font, size 12. One-inch margins. Single line spacing. One page only. You will have around 30 lines in total. Using a header, list your name and the first author (e.g. “Damer et al.”). Do not critique the layout of the paper…where the Materials and Methods is, where the figures are relative to their accompanying text,
the first section (around 5 lines): very short introduction into the paper (after all we’ve all read the paper) addressing what the basic question of the paper is and what basic conclusion they come up with.
The second section (around 20 lines): go systematically through the paper giving a very short description of the actual experiments (again, we’ve all read the paper) followed by fundamental problems that you have with the design, execution and presentation of the experiments.
The third section (around 5 lines): the grand finale where you totally trash the paper or admit to actually liking it (e.g.: “the experiments of the paper are very sound, but the actual findings represent only a minor step forward for this research field”“while some of the experiments are poorly..”