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What article to choose?
You are here because of the two routes to complete a semester project, you have chosen to translate a research article into language and graphics comprehensible to a general audience. You will discuss with your mentor what article to choose, finding one mutually agreeable. It will probably be one of your mentor's own articles, but conceivably you could choose from a larger pool. It must be a research article, i.e. that describes experimental results (observations, not merely conclusions) and the procedures that produced these results. It will not be a review article.
The article must present at least one experiment that seeks to understand how some phenomenon of biological interest works at the molecular level. The focus of that experiment will be the properties of the molecule, not the properties of a cell or organism. The other experiments in the chosen article may or may not have a similar focus.
Since you will translate the entire article, you might consider one that isn't too long and too complicated.
Why make a list of methods for a research article?
You have chosen a difficult route. Research articles generally present multiple experiments, and explaining each has its separate challenges. It is comforting to put your task in a box with sub-boxes within it. Each sub-box is a task for you to complete. Although the overall task is large, by listing the sub-tasks you will comprehend what is before you. You may be able to see which sub-tasks will require more effort than others and budget your time accordingly.
Contents of submission
- Title and subtitle
The title is your own affair. The subtitle should be a full reference for the article you've chosen
- Brief introduction to article
In one paragraph, describe the motivation for the experiments found in the chosen article. You'll begin with a short description of the large scale problem (e.g. why cancer cells divide without restriction) -- one sentence should do. You'll continue with a few sentences that justify the specific questions addressed in the experiments set forth in the article.
- List of experiments and their methods
Make a bulleted list of all the experiments in your chosen article. In general, an experiment will correspond to a figure or table or part of a figure or table that uses a single method. There is no need at this point to understand the experiments. List the figure/table, a brief description of the experiment, and the procedure used to make the observation. If you think that the procedure will not be known to a general audience, then highlight it.
See example.