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Criminology & Criminal Justice Research Guide

Criminology and criminal justice

Welcome to the Criminology & Criminal Justice Guide! Criminology is the study of how crime affects society. It delves into the socio-economic and psychological factors that foster criminal behavior. It studies how the criminal justice system operates. Finally, it details how criminals are rehabilitated.

This guide is intended to be a starting point for students taking Criminology & Criminal Justice courses by providing information on how to obtain books/e-books, peer-reviewed articles, web resources, and citing help. Please do not hesitate to ask for help if you have any questions!

Scholarly Databases

The following databases below will provide access to thousands of scholarly journal articles, conference papers and other similar research documents by keywords, author or other criteria. Click on the other tabs to see additional useful databases.

Search Tip:  An article doesn't have to have the same thesis statement as your paper to be useful. Please read the abstract and/or evaluate enough of the article before you dismiss or decide to use the article as support for your own research. 

You can access our library resources by searching Google Scholar!

If you are on-campus and using either the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, you will be automatically recognized as a member of the A&M-SA community. If you are off-campus or using the Google Chrome browser while on-campus, you will need to configure the settings for Google Scholar so that it knows you are a member of the A&M-SA community. Please see How to Set Up Google Scholar for Off-Campus Use for instructions.

Please keep in mind that not everything available through your library is cited on Google Scholar, so be sure to also use the library's online databases for your research needs. You can also ask your subject librarian for help!

You will need to enter your A&M-SA network username and password to get into the library's databases from off-campus. If you need assistance with this, please visit our Off-Campus Access page.

Search Tips

Search Tips

  • Enter each search term or concept in its own box. You are using the 'and' connector to find articles with each of those terms.
  • Quotation marks searches the database for those words together as a term, such as "minimum wage".
  • An asterisk (*) searches the database for that word plus any variants of the root word. For example, work* will search for work, worker, workforce, and workplace. 
  • Use the OR between words to search for synonyms, such as "low income" OR poverty.
  • Use the limits to filter for a particular source type, such as peer reviewed journals
  • To refine by method enter terms such as quantitative, qualitative or empirical. Note: This method doesn't always work because these descriptors need to be listed in the article's record or abstract in order for them to appear on your results list.  

View more search tips and videos on the Research Help Tutorials tab on the guide.

What is a Scholarly Article?

What is a scholarly article?

Many professors require students to cite scholarly journal articles in their research papers. Scholarly journals contain articles written by scholars for scholars. Articles are reviewed by other scholars before they are published. This is called peer review.  

Many databases allow you to restrict your searches to scholarly journals, sometimes called "refereed" or "peer reviewed" journals.

Types of scholarly articles

There are two different kinds of scholarly articles criminologists cite frequently in their work.  

  • Research or empirical articles present the findings from a specific study.  They typically start with a review of the literature and a description of how the study contributes our knowledge of the subject.  They then describe their research methods (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed) and present their findings. 
  • Review articles summarize the research being done on a particular topic and/or the theoretical approaches commonly taken.  They will reference many research articles recently published on a topic.  Review articles are a great place to start if you want to learn more about a subfield of criminology! 

Take a look at a sample issue of the American Journal of Criminal Justice for some examples of research articles. 

Take a look at a sample article from the Annual Review of Criminology as an example of review articles. 

Library Information

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