ARTICLE REVIEW INSTRUCTIONS
The focus of this course is on the management, administration, and/or leadership aspects of criminal justice organizations. The purpose of the Article Review assignment is to provide you with experience in the identification, location, and analysis of scholarly-quality information relating to the criminal justice field.
For your Article Review, you will research and select a peer-reviewed, scholarly-quality article from a quality web-based resource. You may address any general administration, management, or leadership subtopic that you find generally addressed in the Peak textbook. This leaves the selection of the general topic of the article up to you. However, the major focus of the article must be on a relevant justice management, administration, or leadership issue. As an example, if you have an interest in the corrections area of the general criminal justice field, you may focus your efforts on corrections. However, the article that you review must be on a management related topic that is within the general scope of the corrections field. Granting you the discretion to pick a specific subject area to research is not an open invitation to write on any subject that you just happen to like. Keep your focus for this assignment within the general scope of the Administration of Justice Organizations course.
In your review:
• Discuss the article’s findings, any ethical dilemmas presented in the article, and how the specific topic relates to a biblical worldview.
• Ensure that you include information on the article’s title, author, journal, date/edition, and web location. Address how the administrative, management, or leadership concepts and ideas presented in the article apply to justice administration. In other words, you are telling why this particular article has some merit to the study of criminal justice administration and how you are making a biblical connection to the content of the article.
• Your review paper must be 2–3 pages and be double-spaced.
• Include both a working link that goes directly to the article’s web location and a citation of the article.
• The article must be less than 5 years old.
• You must include a brief discussion of at least 2 Bible verses that have a relevant reference to the main theme of the article.
• Current APA format in the body of the review is required.
Article Requirements
The type of article that you are seeking is also known as a peer-reviewed article, or a scholarly journal article. Here are some key elements for you to look for to ensure that you have located an appropriate article.
Peer-reviewed articles are commonly written by experts in a particular field, reviewed by the publications staff, reviewed by other experts in that field, and printed in scholarly journals that focus on that particular field of study. In meeting the requirements of this assignment, you are not looking for articles that one typically finds in general interest magazines such as Time, Newsweek, People, etc., or even professional/trade publications, such as the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, the National Institute of Justice Journal, Police Chief Magazine, etc. Rather, you are looking for scholarly journals that commonly report original research or details of theories of information that pertain to a specific field of criminal justice administration. A scholarly journal article will use specialized or technical vocabulary that is specific to that field and will provide documentation of a number of sources that will be used in the article by listing specifics in multiple footnotes or a detailed bibliography. The article will also normally include at least an overview of the academic credentials of the author. The journal in which the article appears will normally not contain advertisements. The journal’s printed distribution will normally be of a more limited nature such as to educational institutions, scholars, or professionals in that particular field. The New England Journal of Medicine is an example of one such scholarly journal from the medical field.
You will note that you have not been provided an example of a specific criminal justice-oriented, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal. Conducting the necessary research to locate a relevant scholarly journal as a source of a specific, peer-reviewed article for this assignment is an important element of the assignment.
You may exchange information/ideas with classmates on potential journal sources in the Class Questions area of the Discussion Board Forums. While as a class you are encouraged to collaborate on the research aspect of this assignment, you are expected to independently complete the analysis and writing portion of the assignment.
Your analysis must be provided in current APA format.
For a detailed description on how the Article Review will be graded, see the Article Review Grading Rubric.