Alexander the Great and his change for western cilvilzation
A requirement of your term paper is to conduct research to gather at least three inter-related peer-reviewed academic journal articles. These articles must relate to your assigned textbook chapter, the self-selected three inter-related chapter subtopics as well as the unifying class topic. Conducting this kind of research can be a daunting experience if you do not strictly follow the instructions contain herein.
Explanation of Terms
Peer-reviewed academic journal articles are those which have gone through a rigorous inspection by an independent panel of experts to determine if the manuscript is worthy of publication. Often these articles are lengthy, contain charts and tables, and have statistical data. Further, these kind of articles deal in empirical research and NOT anecdotal supposition, as typically found in newspapers, magazines or blogs. Fortunately, via the college’s on-line library gateway, you will be able to zero in on peer-reviewed academic journal articles fairly easily.
The unifying semester topic will be announced early in the semester. This is the theme common among all term papers for the class. You are to relate your assigned textbook chapter to this topic as well as inter-weaving three self-selected subtopics of your assigned chapter. Therefore and thereby each of you will be writing about the same unifying theme but from a unique perspective via the assigned textbook chapter.
Conducting the Research
Once you’ve been assigned a specific textbook chapter, read the assigned chapter, regardless if it has or hasn’t been covered in class, then pick at least three inter-related topics discussed in the chapter.
Go on-line to the Touro College website,
On the search form,
• click on Peer Reviewed,
• Academic Journals, and Full Articles;
• then fill in the key word/phrase search areas starting with the title of your assigned chapter,
• then on the next line add the unifying semester topic,
• then each of the inter-related chapter discussed topics on separate lines.
Be sure to include the “And” option.
In reality, after each key word/phrase, you should run a Search, then go back via the Modify Search option and add an additional key word/phrase until you narrow the amount of articles to 60-80. By doing the initial search with only the assigned chapter title, you’ll likely get over 10,000 articles. Then, in sequence, by adding the semester unifying topic, the second search will reduce the number of found articles; then adding the first of the assigned chapter’s self-selected inter-related topics, will again reduce the number of found articles, and so on. If you input all topics at the initial search, you run the risk of too few articles to select from or being told none found. Its better to be methodical than take a short cut. From the resulting 60-80 articles, select at least ten which, after reading the summaries/abstracts, seems on the surface to fulfill your needs. Email the self-selected full articles to yourself. Then read, more in depth, each of the ten emailed articles to select at least three which fits your purpose to help writing the term paper. You’ll need to print the three articles in their entirety to hand in with your term paper. I request three articles. You may of course use more. Be sure to photocopy ALL articles to include in the term paper package you’ll hand into me.
Further, email the term paper to me prior to handing me the hardcopy.
