1. State the style sheet
you are using (MLA, APA, Turrabian, Chicago Manual of Style) for citing
sources.
2. Provide a full and
correct bibliographic citation of the article you will be analyzing.
Note that the article should be a peer-reviewed article published
between 1980 and 2000 (more recent articles won’t work as well, as you will
see when you get to question 7).
3. Identify and summarize
the author’s thesis.
4. Summarize the arguments
used by the author to support the thesis.
5. Discuss the most important primary sources used in the article.
What are the primary sources used?
What type of analysis did the author do of the primary sources?
Did the author look closely at a small amount of primary source
evidence? Or did the author take examples from a wide range of sources?
Something in between (explain)?
6. Discuss the secondary
sources used by the author. Did
the author include only sources that agree with his/her argument?
Or did the article also bring up secondary sources that he/she wanted
to challenge or refute? How recent
are the sources relative to the article’s publication date?
7. Try to judge the impact
of this article. JSTOR lets you check to see if other sources have cited the
article. Note that there is
frequently a time lag between articles being written and being published, so
you might not find a citation of an article (even an influential or
controversial one) until two or three years after publication.
From what you can tell, how have other scholars regarded the article?
(For example, have they largely ignored it?
Praised it effusively? Cited
it favorably? Criticized it?
Cited it as if were correct and not worth arguing about?)
8. Write a short paragraph indicating how valuable (or not) you think
that the article is as a piece of scholarship.
(Note that you should assume that whoever is reading the article
already knows basic background information or is committed enough to the
subject to look up whatever they need to understand the argument. In other
words, DO NOT make this a paragraph about your lack of background or personal
interests.)