Day 6

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Today, I spent my time outside of class working on getting my annotated bibliography and seminal works prepared. I started working on my annotated bibliography in the morning, and spent about half an hour researching on APA and MLA style, as I was not sure as to which one was more suitable for my field of study. I started skimming through my pile of 15 books from the SFU and QUC library with the purpose of categorizing the different areas of study that they covered. I came up with the following categories:

• Molecular biology of drugs
• Effects of drugs in the state of consciousness
• Personal accounts of drug addicts
• Psychology of drugs

From here, I e-mailed Neal to ask for suggestions for seminal works. He provided me with the name of one scientist, Eric J. Nestler, who especializes in the study of drug addiction and reward using animal models. He suggested that I looked up peer reviewed papers by him and decide on a collection of 2 to 4 articles for one seminal work. It took me about two and a half hours to decide on which papers to use, as they are more technical than descriptive. I decided to choose one paper relevant to one aspect of drug addiction: One focused on the self administration of cocaine in roedents, one focused on a transcription mechanism of a specific gene and its relationship to drug dependence and finally one focused on the molecular basis and mechanisms of drugs. I also worked on individual outlines of the most important findings and conclusions of the papers in order to get familiarized with the technical terms and also to come up with points of clarification for my next meeting with Neal. Finally, I worked for about 4 hours on writing my annotated bibliography and descriptions on the seminal works.