Two common errors when students write extended essays in Chemistry are that they only use the Internet as a reference source and that they fail to address Criterion F properly. Criterion F deals with the application of analytical and evaluative skills appropriate to the subject. Chemistry students often look at this in a very narrow way and only concentrate on their own experimental procedure(s) as they have been trained to do for the Internal Assessment. Clearly students writing their EEs in other subjects such as History or English B have no experimental procedures so how do they address this criterion? The answer is that they look at the quality and reliability of their source material and chemists should also do this for all the secondary sources they have used. Searching the Internet may produce an excellent and reliable source but it may also produce some that are highly unreliable and possibly even completely wrong. I have often see students use unbalanced equations, wrong structures and wrong chemical statements that they have quoted from an Internet source without ever challenging the reliability of the source (see advice and examples on the webpage on Writing a bibliography). The reason why students need to go back to the original article or a reputable text book if at all possible is that it has been peer-reviewed. No such guarantee exists for an Internet site.

It is interesting to look at the history of peer-reviewing. The Royal Society claims that the first scientific papers to be peer-reviewed were published in the first edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665 (left). The Royal Society has just announced that it is making available to the public free of charge all the archives of the society which include the publications in the Philosophical Transactions. Over sixty thousand articles are accessible from their online archive search. These include such gems as Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper in 1671 and early papers by Michael Faraday such as ‘The source of power in a voltaic cell’ written in 1840. It is well worth getting your students to look at some of these early articles and see the value of published scientific research. For example in 1870 Thomas Huxley FRS wrote: “If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were to be destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded.”

What could be an interesting exercise would be to mark one of these early papers according to the IB Extended Essay criteria. What conclusion could you draw if they did not score too highly? Perhaps the skill and demands of writing scientific papers has developed and changed considerably during the past hundred years or more, or could it be that the EE criteria are not really appropriate for judging cutting edge science? What do you think?