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Anth 318 - Ethnographic research methods

Disciplinarity - assessing your sources

Disciplinarity: 

A common question from students is 'Is this Anthro?', or how do we assess whether a journal is based in our discipline, a related discipline, or is wholly outside of our discipline.  You can assess what the article is about, it's research methodology, sources, underlying assumptions, language and more to decide if it's Anthro-enough for your purposes, and you can also look at the article's context, or where it was published, to help assess this aspect. 

1) Look at the journal's own website, and read its statement of purpose.  What are its claims regarding its focus and discipline? 

Anthropologica says "Anthropologica is the official journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA). Anthropologica is peer-reviewed and publishes two issues per year (Spring and Fall), with innovative sections for theoretical, experimental, and practitioner-based scholarship in cultural anthropology."  

BC Studies' says "Articles are drawn from a number of fields including anthropology, archaeology, archival sciences, art, art history, demography, economics, education, First Nations and indigenous studies, gender studies, geography, history, linguistics, literature, museology, music, photography, political science, and sociology."  

Some journals are very specific to a topic or sub-discipline, some are all about a full discipline and its parts, and some are really general on a unified theme (like BC Studies).   Understanding the purpose of a journal can help you figure out if it's relevant, disciplinary, and useful to you.  

2) Look up the journal in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, to see a summary of it's key topics, whether it's peer reviewed, who publishes it and other factors that can help you assess it.  Below is the entry for Anthropologica: 

Screenshot of Anthropological in Ulrich's Periodicals Index

You can see at a glance that it's Canadian, peer reviewed, still being published, and has a specific topic focus.  

Impact - assessing your sources

Impact Factor 

Impact Factor is a metric for ranking journals.  To find out which are the leading journals in a field  (i.e., those with the highest impact factors, whose articles are cited most frequently), look in Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The impact factor helps you evaluate a journal's relative importance as compared to others in the same field.  In JCR, select the Science or Social Sciences editions and then search for a specific journal or view journals by subject category, publisher or country.

UVic has tools to assess an individual researcher's impact factor, too. Learn more about individual researcher metrics here: https://libguides.uvic.ca/scopus/metrics   Note that there are a variety of methods used to calculate these metrics and none of them tell the whole story by themselves - each has strengths and weaknesses. 

Impact factor can be limited by many factors, so base your assessments on a variety of factors, including your own context, rather than relying soley on impact metrics. 

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