Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Please note: the Internet should be the last resource you use. It can be
used as a starting point to learn key terms or author’s names, but your
primary source of information should be journals and books.
Title
The title needs to be self-explanatory. It should be in the form of a question and explain
what you are researching.
Author’s Name
Please list your full name, grade, and school in this section.
Introduction
The introduction contains the statement of the problem, hypothesis, relevance of the
project, and research objective from your pre-proposal. It also contains the background
information that you wrote before. This section should be in paragraph form and contain
smooth transitions connecting all of the information. The more information you put into
this section now, the less you will need to add for your final paper. If you have questions
or would like feedback on this section alone, before final submission, please email it to
the STAR coordinator. It is also recommended that you have another adult who is not
familiar with your project read through this section and provide comments.
You will need to cite information that you gathered from your literature research. After
stating information that needs referencing, put the name(s) of the author(s) of that
information in parentheses at the end of the statement. The name(s) should be followed
by the date of the publication in which the information appeared. For example: Over a 13
year study of tethered juvenile blue crabs in a subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay,
92% of the mortality was attributed to cannibalism from larger blue crabs (Hines
2003).
Literature Cited
Please list in proper citation form your references in alphabetical order by author’s last
name. The number of references required for this section varies for each level. All
STAR students are required to have a minimum of three sources in their formal proposal.
Hines, A.H. 2003. Ecology of Juvenile and Adult Blue Crabs: Summary of
Discussion of Research Themes and Directions. Bulletin of Marine Science:
72(2): 423-433.