The first step in the search process is getting a grip on the key terms. For an example, let's try the following hypothesis:
Women are more likely to conform than men.
First, we isolate the important phrases; in this case, "women," "men," and "conform." We can use these phrases as starting points for a list of synonymous terms, broader and narrower topics, related words, and reversed word orders. Here's a quick list:
Phrases are searched as keywords unless they are surrounded by quotation marks (" ").
Another helpful tool is truncation. Using an asterisk (*) at the end of a root of a word will search all endings. For example, a search with "conform*" searches the following:
Use the following database sources to search for scholarly journal articles. We may not have everything available full text, use the "Find It!" button to find articles or order them via interlibrary loan.
Contains more than 2.3 million records as well as abstracts for over 2,500 journals, as well as conference papers, books, and monographs. Includes almost 900 full text journals, hundreds of books, thousands of conference papers, and 25,000 author profiles. Topics covered include urban studies, anthropology, criminology and criminal justice, ethnic and racial studies, marriage and the family, social psychology, and sociological theory.
A collection of over 2200 journals in all disciplines, with over 1650 in full text back to 1997; AND over 8000 fulltext ebooks (medicine from 2005-2010, and all STEM areas from 2014).
Provides abstracts from over 12,500 periodicals in the social sciences, humanities, general science, multicultural studies, and others, with full text articles from 8,500 titles, including more than 7,300 that are peer-reviewed. Almost every topic of study is covered. The database is updated daily, and includes searchable cited references from more than 1,400 journals.
Covers professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas. There are 2,500 titles indexed, and linked full text is available.
Here are several academic journals in the fields of sociology & criminal justice. This list is not exhaustive, but these links take you directly to the full-text journals.
Some of these are databases, some are web-based resources. You can also use these to find news articles and some data.
