A good place to start your research is with discipline-specific dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks. These works are great for finding overviews of trends and topics in Criminal Justice, and their references will provide a good place for you to begin or refine your working bibliography. There are a number of fine Criminal Justice dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks out there, but here are some of the industry standards:
- Ireland, C. E., & Rush, G. E. (2010). The dictionary of criminal justice (7th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin.
- Bruinsma, G., & Weisburd, D. (Eds.) (2014). Encyclopedia of criminology and criminal justice. New York, NY: Springer.
- Owen, S. S., Fradella, H. F., Burke, T. W., & Joplin, J. (2011). The foundations of criminal justice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Seigel, L. J. (2012). Criminology (11th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
The next place you might look for a general overview of a topic is the Criminology bibliography in Oxford Bibliographies (http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/criminology). The Criminology bibliography includes a long list of topics (e.g. “Family Violence,” “Police Effectiveness,” “The Chicago School of Criminology,” etc.), each of which is surveyed and summarized by an expert on that topic. This resource is fantastic for identifying landmark studies, and each entry provides a headnote that does a nice job mapping out the critical conversation regarding a topic.
The National Institute of Justice (http://www.nij.gov) also provides helpful and authoritative overviews of a number of issues related to Criminal Justice.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with these introductory and reference works, it’s time to start searching for the scholarly articles and books upon which those overviews are based. In the words of the Renaissance humanists (the first modern scholars), ad fontes, “to the sources.” For Criminal Justice students at CSULB, your research headquarters should be the Library’s Criminal Justice Research Guide (http://csulb.libguides.com/crju). From this page, two tabs will be most helpful for finding scholarly articles: “Find Articles” and “Frequently Cited Journals.” Under the “Find Articles” tab, you’ll be able to open up a number of databases that include citations and often full texts of Criminal Justice scholarship. There are a number of databases listed on this page, but you might focus in on the following:
- Academic Search Complete
- Criminal Justice Absracts
- PsycINFO
- Westlaw Campus Research
With the exception of Westlaw, each of these databases is run on a platform called EBSCOhost; do take note of the tips and techniques on “Searching” under the “Help” link that sits in the upper-right-hand corner of all EBSCOhost pages.
The above databases will connect you to a number of different Criminal Justice journals. Not all journals are created equal. That is, publication in some Criminal Justice journals signifies a higher quality of scholarship by virtue of the higher standards required to publish in those journals. In the Library’s Criminal Justice Research Guide, under the “Frequently Cited Journals” tab, you’ll see a number of Criminal Justice journals that tend to include very high-quality research. Not to put too fine a point on it, but scholarship in the below journals often includes some of the very best Criminal Justice scholarship:
- Criminology
- Criminal Justice Review
- Journal of Criminal Justice
- Justice Quarterly
If you search for your keywords in these journals specifically, you’re likely to get some duplicate results from your earlier database searches, but you may also get some important articles that may not have popped up in your database searches, and you’ll know that these are high-quality articles because they come from high-quality journals.
Next, repeat your keyword searches in Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/). Like the above academic databases, Google Scholar will often connect you to full texts of articles. In Google Scholar, take special note of the “Cited By” feature: clicking this button will take you to more recent works that cite the older article you originally found. The “Cited By” system isn’t perfect, but it often allows you to trace the descendants of important articles and to find (by intelligently repeating “Cited By” clicks) the most recent scholarship relevant to your research topic. Again, you'll probably find in Google Scholar many duplicates from your earlier searches. Additionally, in Google Scholar, there will be a lot of irrelevant material to weed through, but it will also connect you most directly to Google Books.
Your final form of internet research should be Google Books (http://books.google.com/). This database is helpful because it allows you to search full texts in very specific terms, and it includes recent books that might not have made their way into databases, but it also offers only partial previews (20 pages or so), snippet views (3-5 lines), and no previews of many texts. For this reason, it is important to search Google Books while physically at the library, where you can then seek out and access hard copies of any books needed for your research.
At the university's library, continue your research by looking for an annotated bibliography on your topic or text. Also search the library’s catalog for any books that didn't appear in your other searches. Finally, go to the section of the library stacks devoted to your text or topic, and browse the shelves for any titles that might be relevant to your research (some of the most valuable sources in my own research have come from picking up a book that I saw on a shelf near the book I was actually looking for).