Academic Literature Review

Word Count and Research Sources

• 600 Words

• 2 Secondary Journalistic Sources OR 2 Primary Sources

• 2 Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Articles

• MLA In-Text Citations

• MLA Works Cited Page

Essential Competencies

These are the fundamental skills I'll measure in this assignment:

• Diversity (D): Explain at at least two or three perspectives on your topic.  You do not need to agree or disagree with them — this assignment is primarily informative.

• Problem Solving / Critical Inquiry (PS/CT): Critically examine an issue.  Give us in-depth information, focusing on research that most people do not know.  

Learning Outcomes

These are the measures I'll use to grade your papers:

Practice Effective Research

The research process for this assignment takes place in two stages.  First, you need to understand your topic, and then you need the in-depth articles that explore the nuances of academic knowledge.

1. Find 2 Journalistic Secondary-Sources OR 2 Primary Source Explanations:  Academic journal articles are difficult to understand.  You first need sources that will give you enough information to understand what the academic scholars are saying.  Look for news articles about a discovery or people who were directly involved in that discovery.

2. Find 2 Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Sources: For this, you need to find academic research that goes beyond what normally shows up in the news or on social media.  Scientific studies, literary analyses, archeological surveys — these are the kinds of sources you need to find, and they must have been published in academic journals with an established peer review process.

Describe the Role of Academic Genres in Shaping Knowledge

Most people never read peer-reviewed journal articles.  These articles tend to be very information-dense, and they'll be filled with jargon and terminology specific to that field.  Even academic researchers have trouble reading articles from outside their areas of research.  You are not required to fully understand peer-reviewed journal articles — instead, you're simply learning to work with them.

• Learn to Identify Peer-Reviewed Sources: You need to know the difference between a good news magazine and a peer-reviewed scholarly article.  And remember it's not about the author — it's about that peer review process.

• Learn to Parse Information from Complex Academic Sources: Using the Abstracts and your Primary or Secondary sources, learn to use the data from a peer-reviewed article.

Example: Climate Change

For this example, I'mg going to demonstrate how we break down a single academic source to make it more understandable.  Remember that first you need the academic source, and then you use secondary sources to make sense of it.

Let's consider climate change:

Source 1: Scholarly Source on Food Supply

Here's a source that looks at how climate change will affect the world's food supply — clearly an important issue:

Calzadilla, Alvaro et al. "Climate Change impacts on global agricultures." Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2010, Working Paper No. 1617.

I feel like I should understand the issue, but clearly I don't.  Here's a quote from their abstract describing what the study did:

The analysis uses the new version of the GTAP-W model, which distinguishes between rainfed and irrigated agriculture and implements water as an explicit factor of production for irrigated agriculture. (2)

Here's another quote from this source describing their methodology, but I just don't understand it:

The detailed information supplied by the IMPACT model (demand and supply of water, demand and supply of food, rainfed and irrigated production and rainfed and irrigated area) to the GTAP-W model allows for a calibration of the baseline year and future benchmark equilibriums. We use the IMPACT 2050 simulation without climate change to find a hypothetical general equilibrium in 2020 and 2050. The 2020 data is obtained by linear interpolation between the 2000 baseline data and the 2050 simulation without climate change. (13)

From this, I see that I need to understand this IMPACT model and the GTAP-W model.  So I'm going to find a secondary source that explains these.

Source 2: Secondary Explanation of IMPACT and GTAP-W

First, I google the terms "impact model gtap-w model climate change."  And the first source listed is from GTAP: the Global Trade Analysis Project.  So GTAP isn't just a specific model — it's a global research project that features a variety of economic models.  And I did not know this previously.  And I also don't understand the models.

When I tried googling for secondary sources, I kept getting scholarly sources that were packed with technical data — I even tried "'gtap-w' 2050 model news article" as a way to get a news article that specifically referenced GTAP-W.  The closest I got was the report "Colombia: Turning the Tide," a World Bank report that examines water security in Colombia.  But it's a 190-page PDF — there's no way I could read it all for an English 101 assignment.  But I'm going to use it anyway — and then admit my own limitations in using this article.

The Writing

According to the World Bank, "The global demand for freshwater is set to rise considerably in the coming decades, making water a disputed resources: a finite substance sought after by expanding populations" (1).  At the same time, climate change will significantly affect how much freshwater is available.  In their report, they describe the use of GTAP analysis to understand how water supplies will affect agriculture in Latin America (121).  Although I don't fully understand the system they describe, it appears to factor in the land area available for farming, and then it divides those areas into crops supplied with rain versus those that need irrigation (121-22).

Models like this are important because they help us decide how to prepare for climate change.  In their paper on climate change, Calzadilla et al. write that the water supplies for agriculture will become more unpredictable as global temperatures rise.  "Precipitation intensity and variability are expected to rise under a warmer climate, increasing the risks of flooding and drought in many regions" (4).  Calzadilla et al. also describe reasons why different areas of the world will experience either increased or decreased water for agriculture.  The ways that increasing global temperatures affect rainfall, evaporation, runoff, and flooding will change depending on the region described (3-5). 

From this information, I think we need need to study just how much the temperature is expected to rise, and then look at how the rainfall levels will change depending on the location.  With that information, maybe we can predict which farmlands are most likely to be affected by climate change, and then we can look at ways to ensure enough food can still be grown worldwide.

Takeaway

With this example, notice that I did not find all the answers.  (Also, this example is shorter than your assignment.)  But I did report on what I did find, and those citations provide sources that readers can turn to for more information.