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CJ 205: Drugs, Crime, & the Criminal Justice System: Databases

Overview

  • We use different techniques to search online databases than we use in a search engine, like google.
  • These are common search strategies and can be applied to any online database.
  • If you are not getting the results that you need, contact a librarian by visiting the library or emailing askus@hilbert.edu.

Databases for Scholarly Sources

Concept/Keyword Searching

Boolean Operators

Use AND in between the different concepts in your topic to narrow the focus.

Stalking AND same-sex AND legislation

Use OR to broaden the focus of your search

Legislation OR law

Stalking OR harassing 

Same-sex OR LGBTQIA 

Use NOT to exclude a specific term from your results.

 

Additional Resources

Truncation

Truncation:

  • A tool that researchers use that instructs database to search for alternate endings of a word.
  • Type the root of a word and use as asterisk (*)
    • EX: boy* will search for boy, boys, boyhood
    • art* will search for art, arts, artist, artichoke (<-- look for odd results and modify when needed!)

Limit to Peer-Review

When you are in the databases, you can limit your results to "peer-reviewed". This means that only articles from scholarly sources will be displayed.