CJUS P290 History of Social Control in the US

Welcome to the course guide for CJUS-P 381. This guide will assist you in finding a peer-reviewed Journal Article. To the left, you see a tab that says Find Articles. Go there to search the IU Library holdings for journal articles.

What is Peer-Review?

There is a lot of information in society, knowing which information is good (or reliable) can sometimes seem impossible (check your Facebook news feed for examples). The process of peer-review helps to ensure that you are getting quality information. This process starts with a researcher conducting research. Then after that research is compiled and written up in a paper, the researcher sends the article to a publisher where it is then reviewed by other experts in the field. If the reviewers feel that the article is good enough, it is recommended for publication. This is a very general description of the process, but hopefully you get the idea. 

Whatever, I will just use Google

While Google and Google Scholar are both (at times) useful it is important to remember that those search engines bring you results from the entire Internet. When researching an academic topic it can be difficult to tell if something is false or perhaps biased, that is unless you are an expert on what you are researching. This is why it is suggested that you use the databases under Find Articles.