Research Guides: Criminal Justice: Articles

Finding Academic Articles

Most professors prefer that you locate scholarly sources from academic journals for your research, which disqualifies many sources you would find in a regular Google search.

Popular Journals (magazines) are the journals you typically find on newsstands and grocery store checkout lines. Their articles are written and edited by journalists without particular expertise in the field of study. You will usually want to avoid these unless told otherwise.

Academic/scholarly journals, on the other hand, contain articles written by scholars who are experts in that discipline. They often go through a rigorous process called peer-review where they are evaluated (sometimes multiple times) by other scholars in the same field before being published. These are the articles your professors usually want. This page should help you find where to look for them.

Suggested Databases

Criminal Justice (ProQuest)
Comprehensive database supporting research on crime, its causes and impacts, legal and social implications, as well as litigation and crime trends.
Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text
Contains more than 300,000 records selected from the most important sources within the discipline.
Social Sciences Full Text
(1983 to present) -- Covers the latest concepts, trends, opinions, theories, and methods from both applied and theoretical aspects of the social sciences.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Locates articles from scholarly journals and popular magazines. Full text from 1990.
CQ Researcher Plus Archive
Weekly reports dating from 1920s to the present on events and issues of the day. Full text.
Westlaw Campus Research
Law, Business, News. Full text
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is an archive of important scholarly journals offering researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated.

Additional Databases

Legal Source
Authoritative information on current issues, studies, thoughts, and trends of the legal world. Legal Source Includes over 1100 full-text journals, more than 420 law reviews, and indexing for yearbooks, statutes, and other publications.
ProQuest Social Science Journals
Social science articles (including scholarly, peer-reviewed) from over 570 titles, with more than 340 available in full text.
ProQuest Central
Articles, citations, and abstracts on various topics.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context
Presents various sides of controversial topics and social issues. Full text.
Research Library at ProQuest
Locates articles from scholarly journals and popular magazines. Full text from 1991.

News Sources

New York Times Online
Available for current MGA faculty, staff, and students after one-time registration.The New York Times provides access to all of its archived content from 1851 to present day. You receive unlimited access from 1851-1922; 5 articles per day per user from 1923-1980 due to copyright laws; and unlimited access from 1981 to present day.
News & Newspapers (ProQuest)
New Content: ProQuest Newsstand, including Atlanta Journal Constitution, current
Offers international, national, regional, and local papers including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Guardian, El Norte, Jerusalem Post, and South China Morning Post.
Macon Telegraph This link opens in a new window
Search more than 25 years of Macon and Georgia history with the Macon Telegraph Collection. Coverage from 1994 through today with full-color newspaper pages and full-text articles, as well as content only published online.
Chronicling America This link opens in a new window
Access to nearly 3,000 digitized newspapers from 1789-1963.
Georgia Historic Newspapers This link opens in a new window
The Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a part of Georgia's Virtual Library GALILEO and is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Since 2007, the DLG has partnered with universities, archives, public libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to digitize historical newspapers from around the state.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a helpful alternative source for finding authoritative academic articles. There is no Advanced Search in Google Scholar, so if you have multiple terms, you must connect them in one line using your Boolean Operators (and, or, not). For example, "capital punishment" AND juveniles OR adolescents

Research often works best when you search in a variety of places. I recommend trying some of our GALILEO databases in addition to searching Google Scholar. Sometimes one option works better than the other. Other times, you may find some extra articles that boost the quality of your paper or assignment by checking Google Scholar as well. You can also find open access articles here that you might otherwise miss.

Searching GALILEO Discover

GALILEO is a portal where you can search for a wide range of types of sources...all from one single database. Unlike most of the databases listed in the suggested databases section above, which is more targeted to your subject, GALILEO Discover is broad and covers most every subject you can imagine. As mentioned, it's good to try different options, including this one; however, you may find your research easier and more manageable by focusing on the databases in the "suggested databases" and "additional databases" sections.