Criminal Justice
Substance Abuse
Addictions are chronic disorders with psychological, biological, social, and environmental facets. Criminal justice researchers who study addictions and substance abuse aim to understand how to help people affected by them navigate the criminal justice system and prevent repeat offenders. The following resources can help you narrow your topic, learn about the language used to describe this topic, and get you up to speed on the major advancements in this field.
Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9781412950848Publication Date: 2008-11-12
The SAGE Handbook of Drug and Alcohol Studies by Call Number: Available Online (Click Title)ISBN: 9781446298664Publication Date: 2016
Substance Abuse Databases
Research in substance abuse utilizes core criminal justice resources, as well as resources in medicine and psychology. You may find it helpful to search the following databases for your substance abuse topics or research questions, in addition to the core resources listed on the home page.
- PsycARTICLES - EBSCO This link opens in a new windowFrom the APA: a definitive source of full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology
- MEDLINE - EBSCO This link opens in a new windowAuthoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, and the health care system
Substance Abuse Subject Headings
You may find it helpful to take advantage of predefined subjects or subject headings in Shapiro Databases. These subjects are applied to articles and books by expert catalogers to help you find materials on your topic.
Consider using databases to perform subject searches, or incorporating words from applicable subjects into your keyword searches. Here are some addiction subjects to consider:
- substance abuse
- drug abuse
- mental health services
- substance abuse -- care and treatment
- substance abuse & addiction
- alcoholism
- substance-related disorders
- addiction
- recovery
Substance Abuse Example Search
Not sure what you want to research exactly, but want to get a feel for the resources available? Try the following search in any of the databases listed above:
(Addict* OR "substance abuse" OR "alcohol dependence")
We use OR boolean operators to tell the database any of the listed terms are relevant to our search. We use parenthesis to organize our search, and we stem or truncate the word addiction with the asterisk to tell the database that any ending of the word, as long as the letters addict is at the beginning of the word, will do. This way, the word addict, addiction, addictive and other related terms will also be included. Where one idea is described with multiple words (substance abuse, alcohol dependency) we enclose the words in quotation marks. This is called phrase searching and tells the database that these words are only relevant when they appear together and in that order.