Presentation Suggestions: The most important part of your presentation is to be able to find a peer review (aka scholarly, refereed) article. You are looking for an article related to mammals that describes the results of someone's experiment or investigation--this is part of the scientific method. Someone has made an observation and parleyed that into an investigation or an experiment. They did the investigation/experiment and have published their results. You will want to find one of those articles and present it to class.
Points: The presentation is worth 20 points. Eight for the correct article. Twelve for your talk. (Five points will be deducted of presentation is not ready on the proper date)
What to look for: The library has a link that gives a couple of clues to help you identify the proper kind of article (What is a scholarly journal?). Additionally, I always look for a few elements in the text of the article itself.
Look for the word METHODS in your article. This is the part where the author(s) explain exactly what they did and how they did it.
Look for the word RESULTS in your article. This is the part where the author(s) explain what they found. This is often data, lists, numbers and statistics.
Look for the word CONCLUSION or DISCUSSION in your article. This is the part where the author(s) explain how the results affect their original hypothesis. This is perhaps the most readable part of the article.
Look for more than 15 references at the end of the article. Sometimes there will be over 50. If you only see 5 or 6, you probably don't have a scholarly article.
If your article doesn't have the above features in bold or capitals then you probably don't have what you need.
Get my signature or my "OK". Once you think you have the right kind of article, show it to me and I'll concur or tell you it's not right. If you find you article electronically, send me the link and I can look at it.
The library has a few search engines (InfoTrac and ProQuest) that can narrow your search to journals that usually have scholarly articles. They will give you a database used in academia and it will have magazines like "The Journal of Mammology" and not Newsweek or People. Getting into the right realm of journals will be helpful. The resource librarian can help you to use these databases to do advanced searches that will weed out most of the non-technical magazines.