LibGuides: Criminal Justice 311 (Online): Presearch

Tab To-Do List:

1.Review the text on this tab, and watch the demonstration screencast in the Watch Me tab.

2. Try doing a presearch on a topic you are interested - remember, in addition to being able to search for background information on criminal justice/social sciences topics (does the "Broken Windows" theory of crime control hold up?) you can also search it for more information on research methods (what is "sequential sampling"?)

Some Research Methods Reference Works

Reference Books in the Sage Research Methods digital collection
Note - you must be logged in to the WSU Libraries to use this link. If you are not on campus, you will need to use the Proxy Bookmarklet to get access (see the Home page of this guide for more information on this very helpful tool).
Sage Research Methods- Methods Map
"Explore the research methods terrain, read definitions of key terminology, and discover content relevant to your research methods journey."
Part of Sage Research Methods digital library

General Reference Resources

Sage Reference Online
Lots of social sciences content. Good for background information on research methods as well as research topics.

Why presearch? Presearching can be helpful at the start of a research project, to provide background information and help you narrow or expand your topic.

More reference/background resources are available on the Presearch guide. Note: many WSU Libraries reference resources are now available electronically, but there may be a time that you may want something from a print reference resource that can't be checked out and sent to you - in this case, you can use the WSU interlibrary loan system (ILLiad - see the Resources for Online Students tab) to order a specific range of pages from a print reference book to be scanned and sent to you.

Note: Many online reference resources (encyclopedias, handbooks, etc.) are not included in the reference databases below. To find an electronic (not print) reference resource relating to a particular discipline, use a version of this search in the WSU Libraries catalog, Search It (in this case, I have used the term "crimin* which will give me results relating to criminal justice and criminology) - note that I have changed the scope of the search to WSU Pullman (for more on this, see VVV):

and then limit your results to Full Text Online using the filters on the left of the Search It results screen. You will then be able to search for reference works that look relevant to your particular topic within the larger area of criminal justice/criminology.

Presearch Research Guide
Oxford Reference Online Premium Collection
An excellent interdisciplinary reference collection.
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Another good interdisciplinary reference collection.
CQ Press Electronic Library
Includes the CQ Researcher and the CQ Weekly. CQ Researcher is an *excellent* resource for background information on lots of social sciences topics in the news; CQ Weekly provides information about legislative, executive, and judicial happenings around social sciences issues (fulltext back to 1983).

Watch Me: Closed-Captioned How-to Screencast

A Selection of Criminal Justice / Criminology Reference Titles

The Forensic ecology handbook: From crime scene to court (ebook ; can read online and/or download)

More examples - these are electronic reference books that are not in the Sage, Gale, or Oxford packages. Some are ebooks (ProQuest Ebook Central or EBSCO) - for more information on using and/or downloading them, see the ebooks library guide).