CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

Geography 558: Hazards and Risk Management

==========

Guidelines for Critical Review Essay

One of the major assessments in this class is the critical review essay. You might look on this as the preparation of a mini-course in directed readings, in which you fashion a reading list and then teach yourself about some aspect of hazards and disasters of interest to you.

The essay will cover at least seven sources (though more are certainly welcome). Of these, at least five must come from "refereed journals," that is, from research journals that practice "peer review" in the selection of the articles they publish. The other sources could be a textbook, chapter in an anthology, newspaper article, article in non-refereed (usually popular) sources (e.g., National Geographic, Discover, Time, Smithsonian), article in a trade journal (e.g., Emergency Management, Disaster Research: News You Can Use, Natural Hazards Observer), web page, government source, or monograph.

Refereed journal articles can be found through bibliographies and reference lists in other journal articles, textbooks and anthologies, and, often, from materials published online (as in Google Scholar). Look for the kinds of journals that appear frequently in such reference lists. Then, go look up relevant articles in those journals in the library. While you're in the library (physically or electronically), browse through recent issues of those journals to get an idea what's being published on your subject matter in the journals most likely to publish such subjects. This part of library research can get very addicting (and tangential), so be prepared to recognize when you're overdoing it and refocus on the point of your review!

Now that you have found a way into the research literature and read at least five refereed research articles or review articles, you need to prepare the reference list. Please use the following format for this list.

Arrange the list alphabetically by author's (or lead author's) family name.

If it's a journal article, you'd use this format:

Jones, C. 2012. An interesting hazard in Italy. Journal of Some Pretty Weird Risks 14, 2: 235-239.

That is, author family name first. Comma. Initial(s). Period. Year. Period. Article name in sentence format (capitalize first word and proper names/place names). Period. Name of Journal (with all major words capitalized and the whole journal's name italicized) no period and no comma volume. Comma. Number (if more than one issue appears each year). Colon. Page numbers. Period. And use hanging indentation. More often these days, you will also see a Digital Object Identifier or DOI after the rest of the citation. It's optional but helpful. You simply type doi: and whatever numbers and letters come after it, e.g., doi: 10.1017/jspwr.14.2.235.

If it's an article in an anthology (and I'll use three authors this time):

Jones, C.; Gonzalez-Sanchez, M.T.; and Smith, J.D. 2015. Hazards in an interesting part of Italy. In The Big Travel Book about Cool Things to Know about Italy, ed. O.L. Ling and M.N. Ndebele, pp. 45-62. New York and Rome: Publishing House.

That would be last name comma initial(s) of first author. Semi-colon. Last name comma initial(s) of second author. Semi-colon. And Last name comma initial(s) of last author. Period. Year. Name of chapter in sentence case (only first word, proper names, and place names start with capitals. In italicized name of book with all major words capitalized. Comma, pp. page numbers. Period. Name of city or cities in which book was published. Colon. Name of publishing house. If there are a gazillion authors in journal articles or anthologies, you type every last one of them (imagine that you're the fifteenth author: You'd still want to see your name up in lights!). Huge publication teams are pretty common in some disciplines (don't get me lit on planetary science papers!). And the result is some pretty tedious citation.

If it's a book, it comes out:

Sandhu, C.M. 2011. A Terrible Disaster that Hit Toledo. Columbus, OH: Vanity Press International.

That is: Family name. Comma. Initial(s). Period. Year. Period. Book title with all important words capitalized. City (and state or country if you suspect your readers don't know where Columbus is). Colon. Publishing House.

Now that you have your seven+ sources (including your refereed journal articles) neatly arranged in your word processor or citation manager, you need to analyze them in the body of your paper.

One way to go about this is to read the most general or popular source(s) first, just to get a sense of your subject. Then, go through the five research articles kind of casually, just trying to get a sense of what each one is about, how the authors support their arguments, and what you're learning about the subject. This can be a pretty fast, superficial read.

Then, having read all of them and getting a sense of where they agree and where they differ, go back through the research articles, this time taking notes as you go. This will be a slower, deeper read, but at least you'll have a sense of where you're going.

For each article considered separately, you might write notes for it on the following:

Now, consider each article in relation to the others and write notes on the following:

Now, notes strewn among your coffee cups, compose an essay in which you summarize what you've learned about your topic from the group of sources and your analysis comparing and contrasting them with one another. As you compare and contrast them, you should see if you can group them into a couple of distinct themes and then organize your essay around those themes, bringing in particular sections of articles as they relate to those themes. In other words, don't write your essay going from one article to the next: Go from theme to theme. Sometimes, one article might actually contribute to more than one theme, so you would bring them in again when you're discussing the next theme.

This essay should be about five to seven pages long (not counting the reference list), double-spaced, with 1" (2.5 cm) margins all around. Please use 11 or 12 point leading. The essay needs to be very professionally written and free of spelling, grammar, syntax, capitalization, and punctuation errors, and sexist usage as well. Please proofread it carefully (or have a literate and nasty-critical friend or relative proofread it), because about one third of your points will have to do with writing mechanics.

==========

A Few Refereed Journals

==========

It might help if you could see a few examples of refereed journals. I've picked a few that are available through our library, so you can browse through a few issues to get a sense of them (and be able to recognize others that might be useful to you). To get to them, from the Library home page, click on "Specific journals by title" under "Research Tools." There, search on several of these journal titles to get a sense of refereed journals in general.

Often one of the most efficient ways to get into the refereed literature is to use Google Scholar. Doing searches in Google Scholar leads to lists of mostly refereed or other scholarly references. Sometimes, authors put PDFs of their work on their own home pages, so you can download them directly in Google Scholar without having to go through our library. If an article you want is not accessible through the author's web site, however, you need to search for the reference in our library and, hopefully, we have a subscription to the journal it appeared in.

==========
Dr. Rodrigue's Home |   GEOG 458/558 Home |   Geography Home |   EMER Home |   ES&P Home
BeachBoard |   CSULB |   Library |   Bookstore
==========

Document maintained by Dr. Rodrigue
Last revision: 08/15/22

==========