PB2A

Last year, I took Earth 10, which is a very interesting course with regard to climate changes in Antarctica. Thanks to this course, I got a chance to read through some research papers analyzing the effect of global warming on Antarctic. Therefore, I decide to pick an Antarctic-related paper to be the subject I am going to dissect and discuss later in this blog. I think it is easier for me to understand and also closer to our lives than any other dull and exhausting academic papers.

Testing Paradigms of Ecosystem Change under Climate Warming in Antarctica (Testing Paradigms) is the title of this scholarly peer reviewed academic paper. The title, as many other papers’ titles do, directly address the topic of this paper. Rather than making an ambiguous but inviting title, academic papers always be honest and direct to their audience about what they are going to mention. The authors of academic papers, undoubtedly, are those scholars in related fields, and so are the audience. Using jargons, such as “paradigms of change” in this case, can further a precise and concise communication between them, quickly distinguishing the paper itself from hundreds of thousands of other papers that address disparate themes. For laypeople, the secondary audience, words such as “Antarctica” and “Climate Warming” at least indicate and help them understand the content of such a highly scholarly article. Also, academic study is a very serious domain, where objectivity and scrupulousness are highly appreciated. Under such context, or constraint, a brief and clear title is more suitable than a fancy and word-playing one. The certain format is also a convention of academic papers. Each section is laid out one by one in a fixed order: abstract, introduction, materials and methods (experiments), and then results and discussions, and eventually reference. The exigence of paper is usually mentioned in abstract as well as introduction. In Testing Paradigms, the exigence is clearly stated in abstract—“large-scale mechanistic explanations…may not account for complex spatio-temporal processes…we suggest that our network approach to evaluating a recent and widely cited paradigm of change… could be broadly applied.” (Melbourne-Thomas, 1) The exigence is crucial to an academic paper because researchers have to respond to something they deem worth searching. If they are only echoing the same opinions or findings their predecessors had already discovered many years ago, the entire paper is going to be meaningless because there is nothing worth  researching. This is the reason why these scholars are very willing to mention the motivations of their research at the very beginning.

Another convention is the tone and diction. In Testing Paradigms, the first personal perspective, “we”, are employed throughout the paper. We can feel that the discourse to the audience is conveyed in a way like giving a presentation. The communication is one-sided and does not expect any replies but hearing. The tone is formal and objective, and words, such as “evaluate”, “formulate”, “model”, “confirm”, “examine” and “assume”, are broadly used contributing to an unbiased and meticulous expression. As I mentioned above, objectivity and scrupulousness will never be considered redundant or excessive in academic field; hence the tone and diction contributing to these two attributes become typical and repeatedly emphasized among academic pieces. I think they are the most important aspects of a scholarly piece.

Look back at Testing Paradigms, the question posed by this article is straightforward: is the current paradigms of changes accurate? And the approach to test the current established paradigms of changes is to use qualitative network modeling (figure below). As per the description of the authors, such approach is superior over the conventional one because it will account for the complexity and uncertainty which has been omitted by the old approach. The detailed process is very scientific and, well, awesome. By comparing the outcomes of the change of portion of each animal in the ecosystem obtained from different modeling approach, the paper demonstrates that “network models can be used to critically evaluate assumptions about the structure and function of ecological networks and to identify key hypotheses for testing in the future.”(Melbourne-Thomas, 1) In order to understand this paper, we must clearly know what aim of the research is and what the result of research has implied so far, which are all mentioned in abstract and introduction. Therefore, as a layperson, I think introduction and abstract are the most important parts of an academic paper.

Works Cited

Melbourne-Thomas, Jessica, et al. "Testing Paradigms Of Ecosystem Change Under Climate Warming In Antarctica." Plos ONE 8.2 (2013): 1-9. Academic Search Complete. Web. 31 Jan. 2016.