The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics (PSAJ), sponsored by the Pi Sigma Alpha National Honor Society, was founded in 2001 at Purdue University. After 20 years, much has changed in undergraduate research and publishing, but the benefits of producing a peer-reviewed journal remain the same. Undergraduate research has increased in prominence, and the journal has modernized to meet these transformations. This article describes the history, purpose, and operations of the PSAJ. Most important, a survey of former Editorial Board members, Pi Sigma Alpha Faculty Chapter Advisors, and published authors in the journal reveal attitudes toward operating an undergraduate journal, using undergraduate research in the college classroom, and publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, respectively. We conclude with calls to continue to encourage undergraduate research and to assign published undergraduate research in upper-level courses.
This article is the final report of a study of legal ethics and professionalism involving in depth interviews about problem solving conducted with nearly two hundred lawyers practicing in various settings: in different sizes of firms, in different sizes of communities, in private practice and in in-house or corporate counsel positions. Previously published findings of this research project having established that lawyers rarely turn to their ethical codes to solve problems, preferring instead to rely upon informal information gleaned from within their own offices (although lawyers from smaller firms remain more often comfortable with information drawn from beyond the firm than those from larger firms), this article focuses on analysis of the interviews of those lawyers who identified themselves as concerned with issues involving their roles as lawyers. The analysis maps the lawyers' own descriptions of their situations onto the “hired gun” and “counselor” models of lawyer-client interaction taken from the literature. The findings confirm our preliminary findings that these two roles are not mutually exclusive. Although all the lawyers concerned with their roles began in a mentoring mode, most lawyers eventually relinquished their decision-making to their clients, a transition fraught with challenges for many of them. A minority, however, despite the dictates of their code of ethics, withdrew from cases or even, exceptionally, substituted their own decision-making for that of their clients. The article links the mentoring model to the care perspective in the literature of moral development and the hired gun model to the rights perspective. The findings did not establish any support for the claim that the presence of women is creating a "softer" voice in the legal profession. However, two aspects of the structure of the profession, private practice versus in-house practice and the size of the centre in which the practice is located, engendered variations in professional attitudes.
There is a substantial amount of research examining bias in the peer-review process and its influence on the quality and content of political science journal articles. However, there is limited research examining how students peer review other undergraduate research for publication. To better understand the predictors of manuscript evaluations and build on prior literature, this study examines seven years of undergraduate peer evaluations submitted to the Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics from 2013 to 2020. Empirical analyses reveal that a peer reviewer’s prior service on the editorial board (i.e., experience) and race are consistently and significantly associated with manuscript evaluations. By examining how undergraduate peer reviewers assess anonymized manuscripts, this research reveals potential biases in the political science peer-review process. Additionally, the benefits of undergraduate students participating in the peer-review process are explored and discussed.
Walker et al. 2022 contains an error in the Results section. In the third paragraph under "Results," the third sentence should read as follows: "Regarding race, the results show that white reviewers gave significantly higher originality ratings than nonwhite reviewers, with a reviewer's race being the most robust indicator.
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