Database of the Week - Criminology: A Sage Full-text Collection

Criminology: A Sage Full-text Collection is a searchable database that includes the full text of 23 journals. Each article has a bibliographic record with indexed summaries or abstracts and a link the full-text in PDF format. Topics covered include criminal justices, juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, corrections, penology, policing, forensic psychology, and family and domestic violence.

The savvy searcher starts by going to the Advanced Search screen. Don’t be alarmed by all those boxes! Boxes in the same row are being searched with the Boolean “OR,” so if you want to search for family OR domestic, and getting results with either or both terms will do, put them in boxes on the same row. Rows of boxes are combined with Boolean terms, and you get to choose which term (AND, OR, NOT) to use, AND is the default. So, if you want to search for family AND violence, and you want results with both terms then put your terms in different rows. Searches can also be limited by date range.

Search results are grouped by publication type, such as journals, peer-reviewed journals, conference literature, books, etc. Researchers can click on the tab for a publication type tab to display results by data type or publication type. To the left of each search result is a list of Descriptors. Descriptors are indexing terms from a thesaurus or controlled vocabulary assigned to the article. Clicking on a Descriptor will run a new search for similar articles that contain the same Descriptor. When you click on the article title or View Record you can see entire record including the author, abstract, and the references listed.

Criminology includes features to help researchers collect and manage citations. When researchers find an article they want to use, they click the box beside the article then click on Update Marked List and the article will be added to their Marked Records. From Marked Records researchers can email, print, or save a bibliography of the citations they have collected.

Criminology is just one of the valuable criminal justice research resources available at Chesnutt Library. The ease of searching and availability of full-text resources make it a good starting point for your criminal justice research.

Laura Bell Wright,
Interlibrary Loan & Reference Librarian