3)  Your paper must focus on the United States.

4)  You must use a minimum of five journal articles that come from appropriate sociological journals as the basis of your paper.  This means that you may not rely on reference books, textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, monographs, newspapers, news magazines, web sites, book reviews, conferences papers, periodicals or popular magazines.  In order to identify these appropriate sociological journals, you must use the social science sorting device of the SocINDEX (computer program in RVCC library) to get your references.  You must use at least five articles from this index.  Failure to do so will result in a failing grade on your term paper.  Most community libraries do not have the SocIndex, therefore, plan to spend a couple of hours in the RVCC library identifying appropriate articles for your research paper or using the resources online.  Articles retrieved through ProQuest or other on-line paper sources may not necessarily be articles found in SocINDEX; therefore, it is essential that you double check whether these articles are referenced here.  If you are not sure, ask me! You may not use Wikipedia.

5)  Articles that are in journals that are not owned by RVCC may be ordered through the RVCC Librarys Inter-Library loan program.  Ask me or the Reference Librarian to assist you in ordering the articles that you need.  Because there may be a delay in getting the articles through the Inter-Library loan service, it is necessary that you begin to work on you term paper early in the semester.  Lateness in receiving articles is not an acceptable excuse for a late term paper.

6)  Your paper should be 12-15 pages in length; therefore, the topic cannot be
too broad or too narrow.  As a rule of thumb, if there are many books written about your topic, it is probably too broad to cover in a this term paper.  On the other hand, if there are less than ten journal references or if the articles that you selected all very short, your topic is probably too narrow. 

7)  Your paper must be typed double-spaced, with 12-point type and margins of 1 around.  Use ASA (American Sociological Association) or APA (American Psychological Assocation).  This same style is usually found in most of the journal articles that you will be using to write your paper.  It is not the style usually used in English classes.  Any article referenced in the body of your paper should also be referenced on the reference or citation page at the end of your paper and any reference on the reference or citation page should be found in the body of the paper.  You do not need to add an abstract to the paper and since it is a library paper, there will be no methodology section.