general stuff about lifelong learning and the value of academic literature for non-scholarly purposes. Most of this will be freely-available resources, but some may require a subscription or paying a publisher or other entity for a particular item.
This page is a work in progress!
Starting Out: Access Tools for Locating Journal Articles and More
Databases
Books and More
Think Tanks and Research Institutes
U.S. Federal and State Government Information
Nongovernmental and Interntional Government Organizations (NGOs and IGOs)
Specifically for Criminal Justice: Why Lifelong Learning?
Important Information to be aware of about Open Access Preprints and Postprints (or pre-prints/post-prints) and "Predatory Journals"
These tools include browser extensions that you can install that will help you find and get access to scholarly literature. You may also be able to work with your local public library to order books and individual journal articles through Interlibrary Loan, however this service is not always available and may have a small fee.
Note: When searching for open access journal articles, it's important to understand the difference between pre-prints, working papers, post-prints, and article versions of record regarding peer review and publication status, as well as understand how to tell if a journal is potentially fraudulent. You can find information about these categories in the box that is at the bottom of this page, Important Information to be aware of about Open Access Preprints and Postprints and "Predatory Journals.
open access
can search publisher platforms (publishers who publish criminal justice/criminology journals include SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier/ScienceDirect, Springer, and more). Articles that are designated as open access can be read and downloaded at no cost; traditionally paywalled articles will require a fee to read and/or download.
Academic networking and discovery sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu are searchable and often allow downloads of articles, or the ability to request an author to share a copy.
About This Page: The value of being able to locate and read scholarly literature when you are no longer part of a college or university community.
This tab includes resources specifically for people who need to access scholarly information about criminal justice and criminology, including law enforcement and corrections. You may be looking for articles about policing, corrections, victims, the accused, etc., or criminal justice/criminology in general, or you may work in a relevant field - the following articles/books discuss the importance of criminal justice research in policing and more.
Think tanks and research institutions often publish a significant amount of material, much of it of interest to scholars and researchers on a wide range of topics.
*Most will come from a particular political, economic, or social perspective so it's important to be aware of the perspective of organizations and/or individual authors.
Important Information to be aware of about Open Access Preprints and Postprints (or pre-prints/post-prints)
Many open access (freely available) articles have been through the Peer Review process. These may be found in Open Access journals published by a wide range of publishers, including the "Big Five," and also in Open Access/Toll Access hybrid journals. They can also be found on researchers' own webpages and in Institutional Repositories (such as WSU's own Research Exchange) and Disciplinary Repositories such as CrimRxiv (pronounced "crim-archive").
If an article has been though peer review and made available but is not found in a journal, it is called a postprint. Postprints can be fully formatted and include the original publishing journal citation information, or they can look like a double-spaced Word document, or anything in between - the important thing is they have been peer-reviewed and there is acknowledgement of it. Articles that have been through peer review and are published in a journal with formatting and (theoretically) copy-editing are considered to be the version of record, however. (Yet another note: sometimes legitimate scholarly journals do editorial review rather than peer review, which is to say that articles are reviewed by the editorial board instead of being sent out for blind peer review).
If an article has been made publicly available but has not yet gone through the peer review process it is called a preprint (it may also be called a working paper). It may have been made available to get feedback, or, as in the case of many articles published in the COVID era it may be that science is changing so quickly that there is not enough time to go through the (often lengthy) peer review process. CrimRxiv allows you to limit your search to postprints and versions of record, or to preprints and working papers.
In general, it is best to work with articles that have gone through the peer review process. If you are uncertain, see if you can find the title on a publisher site, like SAGE, or Elsevier ScienceDirect, Wiley, Taylor & Francis or another journal or publisher platform. You'll need to make sure it's the exact same article! It may be best to keep to journals that require peer review just to be sure.
For articles that you find "in the wild," you may want to look them up in Retraction Watch to make sure they have not been retracted. I may be wrong on this since RW usually focusses on articles that have been formally published?? Must investigate.
An important note about "predatory journals": Unfortunately, some journals are what is commonly known as "predatory journals," or "deceptive academic publications," or "fraudulent journals," which means that they charge article publication charges (APCs) for publication but do little-to no peer review, or engage in other predatory practices. They often prey on graduate students or newer faculty who really need publications, promising, but not delivering, acceptable peer review. Strategies that someone who is looking to publish a scholarly article can use to avoid publishing in a fradulent journal include (but are not limited to):