Produce a brief outline of your research topic detailing the question to be addressed, the sub-questions you will consider, an outline of the structure of your review, and six key references you intend to use.  Maximum 1 side of A4 paper.  The intention of this assessment task is to give early feedback to students on their planned project.

You should deliver a 5-minute presentation of your research topic structured as a short format academic conference presentation. Focus on concisely introducing your question and summarising your key findings. There will then be three minutes for questions.  Your oral presentation should be accompanied by slides prepared in Powerpoint.  The rule-of-thumb for the number of slides in presentations is 1 per minute (i.e., 5 slides for a 5-minute presentation). You will be penalised if you go over time.

The presentation series will be open to the university community, and so you should anticipate presenting to other Biology academics and students.  This should also be seen as an opportunity to gain constructive comment and feedback from your examiners and peers, which will ultimately improve your literature review.

Identify and rank your top three presentations from the class oral presentations. For each presentation, summarise in less than 200 words the scientific content of the presentation as well as describe in less than 100 words why you considered this presentation one of your top three.

The literature review should be written and formatted as a submission-ready review paper in the style of an appropriate journal. Write your report for a scientifically literate but non-specialist audience.  This must be fully referenced following the referencing style of the journal.  The review must not exceed 3,500 words exclusive of references. A useful guide are the Trends journals (Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Trends in Neurosciences, Trends in Plant Sciences), which publish accessible reviews of this length.

A good scientific review requires a clear definition of the problem and question, comprehensive coverage of relevant literature, a concise and unbiased summary of existing evidence, clear structure, precise spelling, grammar and use of written English and a conclusion that addresses the topic question. 

You should cite at least 20 papers from the primary peer-reviewed literature in your review, but you may have to read considerably more than this to get a rounded idea of the topic. Emphasis should be placed on recent papers (last 5 years).