Guides & Bibliographies

Criminal Justice Abstracts

Introduction

Criminal Justice Abstracts provides comprehensive coverage of the major journals in criminology and related disciplines, extensive coverage of books, and unparalleled access to reports from government and nongovernmental agencies. For each document, an informative summary of the findings, methodology, and conclusions is provided. Topics include crime trends, prevention projects, corrections, juvenile delinquency, police, courts, offenders, victims, and sentencing.

Criminal Justice Abstracts is available to current UTA Faculty, and UTA Students on the web at this web addresses:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-criminal.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in Criminal Justice Abstracts is an asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command CRIM* will search for the words CRIME, CRIMINAL, CRIMINALISTICS, etc.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(DELINQ* OR RUNAWAY*) AND (POLICY OR POLICIES)

The first part of this statement should find material with the words delinquency, and runaways. The second part will look for the words "policy" or "policies". The AND links the two sets. This should be an effective way to look for policies dealing with youthful offenders.

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