Guides: Course Guide ~ ARCH 106 Principles of Archaeology: Dating methods assignment

Journals

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, published since 1915, and publishes original research, scientific reviews, commentaries, and letters.
Science
Science, founded by Thomas A. Edison in 1880 and published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), today ranks as the world's largest circulation general science journal. Published 51 times a year, Science is renowned for its highly cited, peer-reviewed research papers, its special strength in life science disciplines, and its award-winning coverage of breaking science news.
Nature
Nature is a British multidisciplinary scientific journal, first published in November 1869. It is one of the most recognizable scientific journals in the world, and was ranked the world's most cited scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports, making it one of the world's top academic journals. It is one of the few remaining academic journals that publishes original research across a wide range of scientific fields.

Databases

Anthropology Plus

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Index of articles and essays on anthropology and archaeology, including art history, demography, economics, psychology, and religious studies. Coverage: Late-19th century to present.
AnthroSource
A complete full-text archive of all peer-reviewed journals, newsletters, and bulletins published by the American Anthropological Association. Coverage: varies by title
Web of Science

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Index of articles from over 10,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition to multidisciplinary searches, Web of Science provides tools to track citations to individual articles from their date of publication to the present. Now includes Book Citation Index and Conference Proceedings Citation Index. Coverage: 1900-present.

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Evaluating Scientific Sources

Questions on methodology

Is the study design suited to fulfill the aims of the study?
Is it stated whether the study is confirmatory, exploratory or descriptive in nature?
What type of study was chosen, and does it permit the aims of the study to be addressed?
Is the study’s endpoint precisely defined?
What statistical measure is employed to characterize the endpoint?
- Do epidemiological studies, for instance, give the incidence (rate of new cases), prevalence (current number of cases), mortality (proportion of the population that dies of the disease concerned), lethality (proportion of those with the disease who die of it) or the hospital admission rate (proportion of the population admitted to hospital because of the disease)?
Are the geographical area, the population, the study period (including duration of follow-up), and the intervals between investigations described in detail?

Critical questions

Does the study pose scientifically interesting questions?
Are statements and numerical data supported by literature citations?
Is the topic of the study medically relevant?
Is the study innovative?
Does the study investigate the predefined study goals?
Is the study design apt to address the aims and/or hypotheses?
Did practical difficulties (e.g. in recruitment or loss to follow-up) lead to major compromises in study implementation compared with the study protocol?
Was the number of missing values too large to permit meaningful analysis?
Was the number of cases too small and thus the statistical power of the study too low?
Was the course of the study poorly or inadequately monitored (missing values, confounding, time infringements)?
Do the data support the authors’ conclusions?
Do the authors and/or the sponsor of the study have irreconcilable financial or ideological conflicts of interest?

from du Prel, J. B., Röhrig, B., & Blettner, M. (2009). Critical appraisal of scientific articles: part 1 of a series on evaluation of scientific publications. Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 106(7), 100–105. doi:10.3238/arztebl.2009.0100