Blog Post #2: Sources of Scientific Information
Literature Selected: Rain, Sun, Soil, and Sweat: A Consideration of Population Limits on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) before European Contact
Source: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389
This article is a piece of literature concerning the original population distribution and limits of Easter Island before foreign contact. The paper is original research as it is labeled as so and is published in a journal that undergoes peer-review as a requirement for publishing and thus is peer-reviewed. Moreover, the referees for this article are listed below the bibliography. This paper has also been composed by experts from a variety of respected universities such as the University of California, the University of Auckland, and Stanford. The paper also includes in-text citations and contains a bibliography and is thus an academic paper as well. In addition to the paper being labeled as a research paper, there is a results section and although there are no section overtly labeled methods, they detail their methods in more specific sections such as “Characterizing Climate”, “Estimating Extent of Viable Agricultural Systems”, and “Modeling Productivity”. Within these methods sections, the group details the mathematical modeling that was performed through various constraints to produce their results.
All of these factors taken together provide strong evidence that the literature in question is an academic, peer-reviewed, research paper.
References:
Puleston, C. O., Ladefoged, T. N., Haoa, S., Chadwick, O. A., Vitousek, P. M., & Stevenson, C. M. (2017). Rain, sun, soil, and sweat: A consideration of population limits on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) before European contact. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 5(JUL), 69. https://doi.org/10.3389/FEVO.2017.00069/BIBTEX