Subject and Course Guides: Criminology & Criminal Justice: Scholarly Sources

Searching Using Limiters and Fields for Better Results

Most databases allow you to narrow your search results according to certain criteria.

Common limiters (also called filters) include:

Peer-Reviewed or Scholarly
Publication Date
Publication Type
Language

Limiters vary by database. Please check the database's Help page, for specific information.

Citation Linker

Find a specific journal article, journal or book by citation information.

Interlibrary Loan

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ILL (InterLibrary Loan)
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Connecting from Off-Campus
by Walter Betts Last Updated Aug 22, 2023 6713 views this year

Selecting and Using Keywords

What are scholarly sources?

In basic terms, scholarly sources are written by scholars for scholars and go through a scholarly publication process. This scholarly publication process usually includes some form of peer-review, which means it is vetted by experts in the field and therefore considered more credible than information that hasn't gone through this process.

Databases

Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Contains coverage of international journals, books, reports, dissertations, government reports and unpublished papers on criminology and related disciplines
Contains coverage of international journals, books, reports, dissertations, government reports and unpublished papers on criminology and related disciplines. Abstracts covers crime trends, crime prevention and deterrence, juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, police, courts, punishment, and sentencing.
Criminal Justice Database (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing to over 400 journals and full-text to over 170 journals in criminal justice research and the professional fields.
The database includes abstract and indexing for over 400 titles, with more than 170 available in full-text in the areas of criminal justice, law enforcement, corrections administration, drug enforcement, rehabilitation, family law, and industrial security.
Social Services Abstracts (1979 - Current) This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing and abstracting for over 1300 research-oriented serial publications focused on social work, human services, social policy and community development.
Provides indexing and abstracting for over 1300 research-oriented serial publications focused on social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development, including dissertations, and citations to book reviews. Provides links to UTA holdings including full-text articles in journals to which UTA has licensed access.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Covers a large variety of topics and is recommended for most research projects. It contains articles from many academic journals, magazines, newspapers, and other credible sources.
Academic Search Complete is the world's largest scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database designed specifically for academic institutions. It provides access to more than 8,500 full-text journals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracts of more than 12,500 journals and more than 13,200 books, reports, conference proceedings, etc. Subjects covered include: anthropology, arts and literature, computer sciences, education, engineering, ethnic studies, humanities, language and linguistics, law, medical sciences, social sciences, etc. Most content is available in printer-friendly, searchable PDFs. Updated daily.

The Logic of Searching

Using Boolean Operators when searching will give you better, and more accurate, results.

AND- Retrieves articles that contain all of the search terms and narrows down the results.
OR- Retrieves articles with any of the terms and broadens the search.
NOT- Eliminates articles containing the second term which narrows the search.
Using Quotations or brackets will search for a phrase as a whole.
Using Boolean logic and keywords are essential when searching library databases. If you only search Google, you won’t get very far. Google uses natural language, which is great when you want to find certain everyday things on the open web, but natural language doesn’t work in databases.