Outline Your Ideas

Taking hundreds of notes, slipping sticky notes into books to tag pages, highlighting important quotes on an online document— these are all ways to organize your sources and their arguments. But what’s a better way to start understanding how your sources can be used?

Well, one way is to write a literature review.

A literature review allows you to summarize your sources, compare them to other sources, and decide how they will be used in your final research paper— if they will be. It helps you to establish a background for your paper, although it can be a little difficult to understand how to begin to write one.

Speaking from experience, I’ve always had trouble finding a way to best present and articulate my information. I researched it all, I knew what I was talking about, but I found it difficult to organize a way in which it all fit together nicely so that my jumbled notes would make sense to others.

So, what’s the best way to start?

Make an outline. This is good advice for any essay or paper or report. An outline gives you a basis from where to start and can help you organize your notes and thoughts. It can also help you to organize your sources in a way that helps them flow. Then, decide which sources fit into the certain categories/sections on your outline, and from there add your notes.

Also, as a final tip, when you begin to write your literature review, you don’t need to strictly stick to the outline. If you find something that works better as you are writing, then use it. Don’t be afraid to change your outline over and over again; sometimes reorganizing your thoughts helps you to write better than before.

Pros and Cons: Putting Information into Perspective

Taking notes as you read is important in research. Arguing with your sources and writing reminders of pages to review on sticky notes are both excellent ways to better understand your sources and the different aspects of your topic. However, after a accumulating an abundance of sources, one way to begin to organize all of the information is making a pro and con chart.

In the previous two posts, I shared with you new information that I learned while researching my topic. The first talked about the importance of animals, specifically in the case of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) research, while the second discussed alternatives to using animals.

So, how would I organize this information into a pro and con chart, for example?

Pro

Con

·    There are regulations to follow when using animals as experimental models. ·    Animal testing allows researchers to understand how a drug will affect an organism as a whole. ·    There are no other tests that can replace animal testing when full-body testing is needed. ·    Animal testing gives us insight into certain diseases that are not fully understood or for which there is no cure. ·    Animals have played an important part in medical research.

·    Animal testing can be cruel and inhumane (especially when protocols are not followed). ·    There are many alternatives to test how a drug may affect different cells. ·    Animal testing is not always accurate because of the differences in structure compared to humans. ·    Animal testing is very expensive; other alternatives, such as in vitro testing, are much more cost-effective. ·    Alternatives have also furthered medical research.

Although you can jump back and forth between the two, it is not always the best method. The best way to organize is to begin by writing down all of the pros you know off of the top of your head, and then do the same for the cons. Then, you can go back into your sources and look for any other pros and cons you missed and add that as well.

In addition to the pro-con chart, I also take notes next to each bullet point or write down relevant and useful quotes from my sources to use later on. This is just one useful way to make research easier to interpret and use. Write down the sources you want to use for each side, too, so that it is easier to follow your notes.

For example, I would put the article “Animal Experimentation is Unscientific,” (from Animal Experimentation: Opposing Viewpoints) under Con, and write notes about it. This article specifically talks about how animal models are inadequate because they are different from us on a molecular and cellular level. It also states that they challenge the idea that animals have been responsible for major scientific breakthroughs.

I disagree, as although we may be different from animals, there is a lot of similarities that make animal models helpful in research. In addition, it is wrong to say that animals have not been responsible for major discoveries; they have played such a large role that many developments, such as the smallpox vaccine that was created by studying cowpox, would not have been possible without it. I would write all of this under Pro. In this way, my notes stay organized and I can find my arguments easily.

Alternatives: From Test Tubes to Computers

Are animal models necessary in all research, or are there alternative methods that are better suited to the situation at hand? First and foremost, one must discover what the alternatives to animal testing are. 

One is in vitro testing, which is testing drugs or a vaccine in test tubes using human cell and tissues cultures. Computerized models are also used, as well as stem cell and genetic testing methods. Non-invasive imaging techniques, like MRI, are another example. And a final one is micro dosing, which is when “humans are given very low quantities of a drug to test the effects on the body on the cellular level, without affecting the whole body system” (Neavs.org). (Click here to link to the source used for this post.)

These alternative tests all have their own benefits. Animal models may not always be the most accurate models for research, such as in drug testing. Many animals have a different response to medication than humans do. Not only were many drugs not passed because they did not pass animal testing, but there are some drugs that were successful in animals, but failed in clinical trials with humans.

In vitro testing is often used because it tests drugs on human cell and tissue cultures so that researchers can have a better idea of how the drug works on humans. Computerized models are also very accurate and can be used to predict the outcome of drug or vaccine testing. In addition to being more reliable, alternative tests are also more cost-efficient.

Because of this, many people feel that alternatives are a better option for testing. In "Alternatives to Animal Testing Should be Pursued," an article in the book Animal Experimentation, Pardue quotes Dr. Martin Stephens, who agrees that animal testing is "expensive, time consuming and often have dubious applicability to humans" (Pardue 79). Pardue additionally states in her article that there are alternatives, such as cell cultures, that are more accurate and should be used in place of animals.

I agree with some of the points that the article makes, especially where it states that as long as researchers use animals respectfully and try to replace them when needed. However, I am still skeptical about how it claims that animal experimentation can and should be completely replaced. (Remember, always be skeptical and question what you read!)

So are there any disadvantages to alternative testing methods? What are the pros and cons, and how do they compare with the advantages and disadvantages of animal models?