As mentioned this unit’s lecture, an important part of being an academic is knowing where the conversation about your field is located. Part of the goal of this class is to help you find out where scholars in your particular field are having conversations. Knowing this will be useful in your upper division classes because you will likely be required to find scholarly articles in your field.

A basic Google search can get you started.
I searched “What are the major scholarly organizations for criminal justice” and I found this nice list.

Criminal Justice | Professional Organizations

I searched “What are the primary scholarly journals in criminal justice” and found this site.

Criminal Justice and Criminology Journals

Try some basic searches with your academic field and see what results come up.

There are many places you can look to find out this information. Another place to look is in the works cited of your textbooks. Note which journals you often see in citations. If you have a journal article that you have studied in a class before, look at the citations in that article. Which journals do you see again and again? It is likely that those journals are important in your field.

Many times journals are associated with scholarly or professional organizations. For example, the primary organization of scholars interested in Composition Pedagogy (the study of how best to teach college composition courses) is called the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and it has a related journal called College Composition and Communication (the CCC).

Assignment:

Find one professional organization in your field. Link to the website. List the following information.

What is the organization’s mission? (Look for a mission statement on the first page, a page called “mission” or maybe “history”.)
What kind of scholars are members of the organization?
In what areas/fields does the organization specialize?

Next, find three scholarly journals in your field. List their names. Briefly report on one. Provide a link to the journal’s webpage and answer the following questions.

What kinds of articles does the journal publish? Does the journal state its focus?
What citation style is used in the journal?
Is the journal peer reviewed?
Does the NU library carry the journal?