ANTH 204: Library tips for your critical review assignment
This web page is designed to be used in conjunction with your Native Peoples of North America course outline and the instructions there for the Critical Review of articles about an Indigenous issue in Canada.
While your professor's instructions and assignment guidelines always come first, you might also find these guides from other university websites useful:
- Critical Analysis (Southeastern University). From your professor's assignment description.
- Writing a Critidal Review. (University of Toronto Scarborough). From your professor's assignment description.
- How to write a Critical Review of a Journal Article (Queen's & University of Toronto Mississauga Library)
Search any of these article databases to find recent articles from academic, peer-reviewed, journal articles about Indigenous issues in Canada:
- ProQuest Combined Canadian - Canadian journal articles, newspapers, current events & theses
- iPortal: Indigenous Studies Portal - Canadian tool, browsable by subject. Watch out, recent articles can be more difficult to locate.
- Bibliography of Native North Americans
- Academic Search Complete - all subjects, all regions including Canada
- SOCIndex: focused on sociology and social sciences, including anthropology
- Anthropology Plus: the most anthropology-specific database, but only the first stop for multi-disciplinary topics.
- Google Scholar
**IMPORTANT TIPS:
- Be sure to select full-length research articles, NOT book reviews, literature reviews, systematic reviews, commentaries, news items, introductions, conclusions or editorials. See also Evaluating Sources below.
- You can use Date Limits to ensure you search for articles published recently, such as after 2010
Find your two peer-reviewed articles about Indigenous issues in Canada by browsing journals such as:
- Aboriginal policy studies
- AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples
- Canadian Geographer
- Canadian Journal of Native Studies (up to 2019)
- Decolonization: indigeneity, education & society (up to 2018)
- International journal of Canadian Studies
- International Journal of Indigenous Health (latest issue includes articles about Canada)
- International Indigenous Policy Journal (editorial board Canada-based)
- Native American and Indigenous Studies (includes Canadian topics)
- Northern review
- Recherches amérindiennes au Québec (up to 2019)
- Settler Colonial Studies
- Turtle Island Journal of Indigenous Health
**IMPORTANT TIPS:
- Be sure to choose recent issues of the relevant journals, between 2010 and now
- Be sure to select full-length research articles, NOT book reviews, literature reviews, systematic reviews, commentaries, news items, introductions, conclusions or editorials. See also Evaluating Sources below.
- Journal and publisher web sites can sometimes lead you astray to non-academic articles. Make sure the article you choose is in the journal you wanted, and meets the criteria discussed with your prof. See: Is it scholarly?
For your assignment you will need to find a current news article of at 500 words or more, concerning a specific Indigenous issue in Canada.To find this, you can:
Use any of these news databases:
- Canadian Newsstream - includes Globe & Mail, Montreal Gazette
- Eureka.cc - includes La Presse, Le Devoir, L'Actualité
- Factiva - includes small and large Canadian newspapers
- APTN news
- CBC news: Indigenous
- **see also: the Eastern Door (community-based newspaper serving the community of Kahnawake) and additional First Peoples' news sources on the First Peoples Studies Research Guide (last section of the page)
To find additional material related to the issue discussed, you can use your course texts, but you can also try more library resources:
- The same Article Databases as listed above
IS IT SCHOLARLY/ACADEMIC/PEER-REVIEWED?
Your professor's instructions should always be the first criteria in determining what qualifies as an appropriate academic source. If you feel you need additional guidance in this area, however, you might find some relevant tips in the guides below.
- Our library tutorial on: How do I know if an article is scholarly or peer reviewed?
- A quick tip or quick video from our library guide about peer-reviewed articles
- Scholarly vs. Popular Sources guide from Berkeley (for book chapters as well as journal articles)
- Peer-review in 3 minutes (NCSU Libraries)
When evaluating the quality of a variety of material, the following library guide might provide some help:
- Your outline states that you must include full references and page notations (in-text citations) for the article you are analyzing and any other material you use.
- The APA Citation & Style Guide can help. For example:
- sample full references for an online journal article for your cover page
- sample page notations for the body of your paper (also called in-text citations)