Use this form
to provide a review of a peer-reviewed journal
for Prof. Wendy Laura Belcher's free website,
*Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences* at
https://journalreviews.princeton.edu/journals-reviewed/The purpose of this website: "We give you the scuttlebutt on academic journals—aiding you in selecting the right journal for publication—in reviews that are sometimes snarky, sometimes lengthy, always helpful."
*****Instructions****
1. To get a sense for the genre, go to the website and read the reviews for Camera Obscura, boundary 2, and Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
2. Identify a journal you would like to review. Make sure that a review of it does not already appear on the website. If the review there is extremely short, you can go ahead and review it again.
3. Either online, or by looking at print issues, gain access to the last five years of issues. All reviews must be produced by deeply reading the journal and getting a sense for broad trends, specific arguments, and forms of structure.
4. Read the table of contents for the last five years. You can identify trends from reading nothing but the titles, such as a journal turning from one general interest to another (e.g., from ecocriticism to minor language literature). Write down what you see.
5. Read abstracts for all the articles over the past five years (or, if there are many, at least thirty) and modify or expand your list of trends accordingly.
6. Read at least fifteen introductions. How do they work? How long are they? What do they start with? Where does the argument appear and do the arguments have any commonalities? How many citations does each have? Are certain theorists consistently named? What are their claims for significance and where do they appear? What methods are used?
7. Skim ten other articles that interest you. How long are they? How are they structured? How many citations do they have? What kind of structure does they have? How do they present evidence?
8. Pick three to five articles and read them carefully. Do they confirm what you have already noticed? Review the questions above.
9. Pick one article you really like and outline it so that you understand how it is structured at a deep level.
10. Read what the journal says about itself on the website, especially its submission guidelines and any editor's articles about the journal itself. Collect the information needed below about methods of submission, page lengths, etc.
11. Use this form to write up your findings. Only those reviews that are careful, thorough, and thoughtful will be posted on the website. All will be edited for style, grammar, content, and length.
