Electronic resources have made a wealth of scientific research materials easily available. E-journals are one of the most dramatic changes that have occurred in scientific publishing in the past decade.
For social scientists, the holy grail is JSTOR, "The Scholarly Journal Archive."
JSTOR is very easy to use. You can choose to "browse" journals or "search" journals for a particular phrase, title, or author. You will find that for most journals, the most recent years are not available. This is done so that professors continue to subscribe rather than just using JSTOR!
Your Assignment: Select a political science article of interest to you that was published in the last ten years. The journal article must be in one of the journals listed on JSTOR under "political science". You may choose an article either via browsing or searching. Read the article and provide me a one page summary which must answer the following questions:
I encourage you to work in groups of up to three on this project. Your group report must include the typed summary with all of your names, and the first page of the article that you are summarizing. You will also be required to give a short (5 minute) presentation of your article in class.
Information on Jstor:
JSTOR can be accessed at http://www.jstor.org from a computer network at a JSTOR participating institution. This means that any on campus computer will allow you access to JSTOR. If you are off campus, you will have to validate yourself as a Reed user by going to the Reed library "gateway" (https://simeon.library.reed.edu:2500), enter your Reed ID and password, then click at the bottom of the page on "You can access some library resources from off campus". JSTOR will appear on that list.
If you need more assistance on using JSTOR, please see the reference librarians.