The topic for your research paper can be anything pertaining to port security. However, you must clear your topic with me via the message system before proceeding. If you struggle to locate a topic, I can assign a topic to you.

Here are a few suggested topics: Piracy, Port Facility Operations, Maritime Transportation System, Organized Crime, United States Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection.

You are to prepare your paper in a word document (Times New Roman, Font 12) using Turabian style format, 7th edition ("Turabian 7th edition quick guide attached). Pay close attention to the samples for proper citing of bibliography references and footnotes. Your research paper should be 10-12 pages of content excluding your title page and bibliography page. A minimum of 6 outside references required.

Turnitin:
When you submit your paper it will be automatically check it through Turnitin for plagiarism. It is important that you closely review your Turnitin report and similarity score. No amount of copying is acceptable (allowance for references and quotes) and your quotes must not be more than 10% of your content. Contact me with an explanation for any similarity score over 20% as a high score may indicate plagiarism.

Please follow these requirements and format to optimize your grade points. This paper is due at the end of week 8 as indicated in the syllabus. If you have any questions or concerns do not hesitate to contact your instructor.

Prepare your final draft for submission to include at a minimum the following components:
Title Page of the Paper. The title of your paper should be brief but should adequately inform the reader of your general topic and the specific focus of your research. Keywords relating to parameters, population, and other specifics are useful. ALWAYS use a Title Page for graduate work! Your title page will include the title, name, course name and number, and Professor's Name.

Introduction, Research Study Question(s), and Purpose Statement (1-2 pages): This section shall provide an overview of the topic that you are writing about, a concise synopsis of the issues, and why the topic presents a "puzzle" that prompts your research questions, which you will include.

Review of the Literature (3-5 pages): All research projects include a literature review to set out for the reader what knowledge exists on the subject under study and helps the researcher develop the research strategy to use in the study. A good literature review is a thoughtful study of what has been written, a summary of the arguments that exist (whether you agree with them or not), and are arranged thematically. The literature review is not an annotated bibliography and should be written in coherent narrative style. At the end of the summary, there should still be gaps in the literature that you intend to fill with your research.

Method and Research Strategy (1-2 pages): This section provides the reader with a description of your strategy to conduct research for this paper. It identifies your variables and how you operationalized your research approach. It describes the data you found and how you analyzed it for your Analysis and Findings. This section describes any limitations you discovered about your strategy and how you overcame them. Given the length of the class, this section usually identifies the independent and dependent variables and describes how the researcher plans to analyze them to arrive at reasonable findings. Dependent variables are those conditions that are potentially impacted by independent variables. I have described the method you will be using: ethnographic case study.

Analysis and findings (3-4 pages): Are not the same as conclusions. In the analysis component of this section you identify how you analyzed the data. The second part is the finding you got from your analysis of the data. The findings are the facts that you developed, not your interpretation of the facts. That interpretation is conducted in the conclusions and recommendations section of the paper.

Findings will come from the prior research you examined and your analysis of those prior findings to create new findings for your paper. While there may be some facts that are such that they will stand and translate to your paper, the intent is to create new knowledge, so you will normally analyze the data to create your own findings of what facts that data represents.

Conclusions and Recommendations (2-3 pages): This section is where you give your interpretation of the data. Here you tell the reader what the findings mean. Often the conclusions and recommendations sections will mirror the findings in construct as the researcher tells the reader what that researcher sees as the meaning of that data, their conclusions. Then, drawing on those conclusions, the researcher tells the reader what they believe needs to be done to solve/answer the research question. This section may include recognition of any needs for further research and then finishes with a traditional conclusion to the paper as a whole.

References: This section will contain all references, cited in Turabian format, properly indented, and alphabetically arranged. Your paper must contain a minimum of 6 reference sources with at least 4 of them being peer-reviewed journals.Entitle this section as "References" following the parenthetical and reference citation format style within Turabian. You should be compiling sources and adding to them as you gone along throughout the semester. They should be error free!!!

Turabian Format:
Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. 7th ed.Revised by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, and University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff. Chicago: University Press, 2007.