There is an essay requirement to be completed for this course and we have selected three topics that you can choose from.

1. Synaptic plasticity
2. Critical period during development of the visual system
3. Animal models for Alzheimer’s disease

Instructions on how to write your essay.

Write your paper individually and communicate with with your assigned student assistant before the deadline if you want feedback on your paper. You can choose to write the paper in either Norwegian or English. The paper has to meet the following criteria:

The text should be a review of minimal 1500 and maximal 2500 words, covering one of the topics listed above

The review should include the following sections:   introduction, main part of text , conclusion, and references.

1. The first part is the introduction. Start with a heading: Introduction.  The introduction outlines the overall background of the topic, provides relevant information and logically leads to the aim of the paper, which should be at the end of this section.  No further text should follow the aim of the paper. The introduction is limited to max 300 words.
2. The second section of the paper, the main text, starts without a general heading like Results or Discussion. You should organize the main text by using headings and subheadings that help the reader to a structured reading and make it easy to grasp the logic of your review paper.
3. The main text is followed by a section for which you use the heading: Conclusion. In this section you describe the main conclusions of the paper. This section should not include further discussion of the data and should not include references.
4.  At the end of your paper, you should provide a list of references (Note: The list is not included in the word count). Use the heading: References for this part. Use Vancouver style.

i. Citations in the reference list are listed in the order they appear in the text, starting with number 1 (see also ii) Use abbreviated journal names as provided in PubMed.

In case of journal publications use the following format:

1. Author A, Author B, Author, C (2010) Writing of a scientific essay. J Imaginat.  5:57-63.

In case of a book chapter or a book:

2. Author A (2010) Writing of a scientific essay. In: How to write and publish a paper. A. Author, B. Author, editors. Publisher, city, country, pp 5-11.

3. Author B (2010) How to write and publish a paper. Publisher, city, country.

ii. In your text, refer to a publication by using a number in super script, in the order they appear in the paper.  For example:

Introduction

The development of the entorhinal-hippocampal region continues well into postnatal life. While entorhinal-hippocampal principal neurons and interconnections are present during the late embryonic stages of development in the rat^1-5, over 80% of the granule cells in the dentate gyrus are born postnatally² and interneurons generally reach their final position only at the end of the second postnatal week⁶. Hippocampal dendrites continue to arborize and form synapses for several weeks after birth^3,7-9, GABAergic synapses remain excitatory for about two weeks^10,11, and the rhythmic network activity typical of the adult hippocampus appears only at the end of the second week¹².