In the last step you learned about how government agencies study and provide analysis on the impact of legislation. Academics, also provide in-depth studies into a policy issue or legislation and publish their works in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. While the aim of these studies is not always to propose solutions to the problem, their studies are thoroughly done and vetted by the peer-review process, and you can gleam good insight into the effectiveness and implications of a policy or legislation through these studies.
Try out searching for the name of your legislation in the databases.
These databases contain scholarly (peer-reviewed) and popular articles, reports, and grey literature from publication in the legal and political science disciplines. Since they are discipline-specific, there is often a lot of authoritative and well cited information on the topic. However, the peer-review process takes time. You also need to be mindful of what type of source you have retrieved - policy papers, reports, and grey literature should be evaluated carefully.
Sometimes topics we are discussing are not contained to one specific discipline. In this case you will want to use a database that contains articles from the sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities. They are a great way to see who is talking about your topic and to expand your research.
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, primary sources, and high-quality images. It has an archive of more than 1,000 scholarly, interdisciplinary journals, with full coverage for all but the most current 3-5 years. Images are contributed by universities, museums, and community and private collections. JSTOR is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
Law reviews or law journals are the primary forum for legal and policy scholarship in the U.S. academic legal community.
Use the following exercises to learn more about locating scholarship on your policy area and legislation.
