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Criminal Justice: Finding Articles

Pathfinder for doing research in Criminal Justice.

How do I Find a Research Article? Original Box

BEFORE you jump into a database, critically think about your topic and follow these steps:

1) Identify the key concepts. The databases do not like phrases (ex. how does physical therapy improve shoulder conditions).  Use only the key concepts terms as physical therapy, shoulder.

2) Develop synonyms for your terms.The term shoulder may not be used to represent that concept in every article.  Maybe the term clavicle is used? Or rotator cuff?  Adding these with "or" in between will help you find more items. For example --> shoulder OR clavicle OR "rotator cuff"*

3) Combine your terms well, using Boolean logic operators (a fancy way of saying and, or, and not). For example, "Physical therapy" AND (shoulder OR clavicle OR "rotator cuff". * A short video on Boolean logic is linked in the box below.
              * Quotation marks force phrase searching


Additional Search tips

Selected searches by subject:

Other key words:

  • Disability
  • Function
  • Interventions
  • Mobility
  • Modalities
  • Nutrition
  • Physiotherapy
  • Practice
  • Therapeutic

Boolean Searching

What is a Research Article?

Research or scholarly articles generally have several characteristics that define them.  They:

  • are written by and for academic faculty, researchers and/or experts
  • use technical or field-specific vocabulary
  • give full bibliographic references (AKA a "Works Cited List")
  • are published mostly in academic journals, with titles like the American Journal of Sociology
  • are generally sober and serious in tone
  • may have charts, graphs and table but are not glossy and colorful like magazines
  • often report results of research

The most prestigious research articles are "peer-reviewed", meaning they are edited by an expert panel.

Finding Articles

The same approach to keyword searches works best for finding journal and magazine articles in our licensed Research Databases. We recommend that you search using these databases and not Internet search engines such as Google so that you may obtain the full-texts of articles when we have rights to them.

Often, a link to the FULL-TEXT will be found within the description (i.e. citation) for the article. When it is not, click the “Find-It” link  to see whether UToledo has access to the full article.

Additional articles on criminal justice, criminology, and related topics may be found searching other UToledo Research Databases:

See the full list of Research Databases by Name or Subject