User:Sarahnalbandian/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Forensic psychology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I am a psychology major, and I do find an interest in forensics as well. This article is important because it describes what forensic psychology is and how it is applied in law, government, crimes and more. My first impression of this article was that it does go into a lot of detail of modern TV shows and serial killers. However, it also does go in what seems like chronological order of the history of forensic psychology, education that individuals must receive to practice as a forensic psychologist and common types of evaluations during court hearings or proceedings.

The article begins with a good topic sentence that simply explains the idea of what forensic psychology is. It is clear and concise. However, it does not go over the article's major sections in the lead section. The article mainly discusses what the topic of forensic psychology includes without any further detail of what will be later mentioned in the rest of the article. It would have been more appropriate to submit links to each section in the further areas of the article. The lead also does not include information that is not present in the article, however it might be a little too overly detailed with the 10 links attached to the introduction. The article's content is relevant to its topic. It first goes over the history of forensic psychology, and how psychology was introduced in law situations. The article discusses the organizations formed as well to solidify the idea of forensic psychology being used in court rooms today. From reading this article, there does not seem to be any biased opinions. The sections go into a good amount of detail regarding the subject they are covering. For example, the practice and research section gives sufficient information about what types of work forensic psychologists can do on a day to day basis as there are many different aspects of the job. However, the article does lack organization. I feel as though the topics and sub topics are splattered everywhere and not much thought was put into placing similar ideas next to each other. However, that is just my opinion. The sources presented in the article are also sufficient. The sources give good background information, and it also does talk about important people and court battles that forensic psychologists were a major part of. Out of the 5 source links that I clicked on, all 5 of them worked and directed my laptop to another page. There is only one image in the entire article which is of a book called "On the Witness Stand" by Wilhelm Wundt who was one of the first experimental psychologists. I'm not very sure if the image is necessary in this article as the book was not further discussed after the image was shown. All in all, this article was easy to read however I believe it would have been easier to read if it was more organized. The subsections could have been placed under one big heading instead of the multiple different smaller ones that they are currently under.

Evaluate the article

(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)