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Criminal Justice

This resource is intended to guide your research in Criminal Justice courses. It will help you identify resources and strategies for topics within Criminal Justice.

Police Administration & Operations


Research in Police Administration & Operations includes topics like crime analysis, policy development, leadership and community policing. Researchers need to understand how different policy and police leadership choices can affect their departments and their communities.  The following resources can help you narrow your topic, learn about the language used to describe topics in this area, and get you up to speed on the major advancements in this field.

Police Administration & Operations Databases

Research in Police Administration & Operations utilizes core criminal justice resources, as well as resources in law and leadership. You may find it helpful to search the following databases for your research, in addition to the core resources listed on the home page.

Police Administration & Operations 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:

  • police administration
  • police administration -- laws, regulations and rules
  • police administration -- safety and security measures
  • police administration -- investigations
  • crime prevention
  • police personnel
  • public policy
  • community safety

Police Administration & Operations 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:


(police OR "law enforcement") AND (administration OR operations OR lead*)


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 leader with the asterisk to tell the database that any ending of the word, as long as the letters lead is at the beginning of the word, will do. This way, the word leader, leadership and other related terms will also be included. Where one idea is described with multiple words (law enforcement) 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.