Criminal Justice

Criminology

Criminology is the study of crime and deviant behavior. Scholars who study criminology try to understand how to reform criminal law and the causes of crime including behavioral patterns of criminals. The following resources can help you narrow your topic, learn about the language used to describe criminology topics, and get you up to speed on the major advancements in this field.

Criminology Databases

Research in criminology utilizes core criminal justice resources, as well as resources in sociology and psychology. You may find it helpful to search the following databases for your criminology topics or research questions, in addition to the core resources listed on the home page.

Criminology Journals

Criminology 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:

• Criminology
• Criminology -- Economic Aspects
• Crime -- Sociological Aspects
• Crime -- Environmental Aspects
• Sociology / Criminology
• Crime
• Criminal Law
• Criminology & Law
• Criminal Statistics
• Criminal Justice System

Criminology 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:

criminology OR (Crim* AND (socio* OR Psych*)) OR (Law AND (socio* OR Psych*))

Criminology is an accepted word for this area of criminal justice, but other ways to talk about this also exist. In this search, we use OR boolean operators to tell the database any of the listed terms or clauses are relevant to our search. We use AND to tell the database when both terms or clauses are required. We use parenthesis to organize our search, and we stem or truncate the words crime, sociology and psychology with the asterisk to tell the database that any ending of the word, as long as the letters root letters are at the beginning of the word, will do. This way, the word crime, criminology, criminal and other related terms will also be included. Where one idea is described with multiple words (criminal justice) we can 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.

Criminology Organization Websites

Criminology Web Resources