User:Siennawu1/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
DNA methylation in cancer

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the topic is within the field of epigenetics, which is the subject of my class. Cancer is a very pressing and interesting medical issue to study, so I wanted to see how DNA methylation, which I have learned about in class, affects or applies to the topic of Cancer. After reading the lead section, I see that DNA methylation plays a substantial role in silencing genes such as the DNA repair gene, which may eventually result in the progression of tumors. My preliminary impression of the article before reading it entirely was that DNA methylation, though a small cellular process, could widely affect the expression of genes. However, I just was not sure about the specific statistics and prevalence of how much methylation had to occur in order for a cancer to develop.

Evaluate the article
The first sentence and following paragraph in the lead section did a great job of summarizing what methylation was, as well as giving the reader an idea of what the article would be about. The second paragraph was a little more difficult to grasp; it took me a few times of reading to understand that the authors were trying to emphasize that transcriptional silencing via methylation might be more likely to cause cancer than a DNA mutation would - I believe this sentence "However, transcriptional silencing may be more important than mutation in causing gene silencing in progression to cancer" is not worded very well. The syntax allows for confusion to easily arise. Perhaps, the sentence could be edited to "However, transcriptional silencing may be more effective in causing gene silencing than a mutation would during the progression to cancer".

The content was quite concise; I appreciated all of the statistics that were given, though I wish the authors had synthesized/summarized more at the end of each paragraph, so I could see how the statistics fit in with the overall theme. I could not quite make sense of what the numbers meant. Though the table included a variety of cancers, only colorectal or breast cancer were mainly discussed in the content section of the article, which led me to wonder why.

The tone and balance was neutral and appropriate for a factual scientific article. With regards to sources and references, they all looked like credible peer-reviewed articles.

I think my biggest concern was the organization and writing quality; some of the sentences were run-on or difficult to understand. Scientific writing can be complicated, as concepts are difficult to put into words at times - so this I understand.

It looks like this article does not have a talk page - so it seems like a relatively new/niche article.

The strengths include the peer-reviewed sources and lead section. I think the biggest way the article can be improved is through grammar, and by summarizing each section so that the reader understands how the statistics and data fits into the overall theme of DNA methylation more. Because this topic is a newer field of science, it makes sense that it is more of an underdeveloped-page.