Criminology & Multidisciplinary Databases
Academic / Scholarly Journals
Journals may be called periodicals, serials or magazines. They are usually published weekly, monthly or seasonally. Some are scholarly and can be called peer reviewed or refereed. An article is usually a short written piece or essay on a specific subject.
Peer reviewed Journals
Peer reviewed journals (also called refereed journals) are considered higher quality and these are the ones you should use in your assignments.
Peer reviewed journals are written by experts and are reviewed by several other experts in the field before the article is published in a journal. This extensive editorial process takes place before publication and ensures that the articles are of a very high quality.
Most databases allow you to restrict your search to peer-reviewed articles.
The best place to find journal articles - both scholarly and peer-reviewed - is in a Database.
The Library subscribes to a number of databases which can be found in the A-Z Databases List.
When searching for articles for your education assignments, remember
- Search ECU Worldsearch as a starting point to help you refine your search terms and find general information on your topic
- Search the Key Criminology Databases to retrieve more targeted and relevant search results
- If you have time, or have the need for additional resources, search through multidisciplinary databases (some of which are listed here)
Refer to the Law Library Guide for more databases that contain Australian legal journals.
If you are a Research Student, you may wish to use citation databases to expand your research further.
How to find a journal article from a Reference
Is your journal article peer reviewed?
The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) provides free internet access to Australasian legal materials including: primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports for example) and a substantial collection of law journals.
AustLII uses it's own LawCite Citator.
Note: Case law is mainly unreported judgments.
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eLibrary AustralasiaOffers a broad, general coverage of most disciplines. View full text articles from a range of journals, newspapers, magazines, newswires, TV and radio transcripts, maps and image sources.
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Emerald Journals & EbooksProduces a comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed management journals. This database features 175 full text journals and reviews from the world's top 300 management journals.
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Humanities & Social Sciences CollectionCovers agriculture, arts, Asian studies, business, cultural studies, education, history, indigenous studies, law, media, political science, reference, social sciences, science and technology.
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JSTOR Arts & Sciences CollectionThis is an archive of scholarly journals in the social sciences, including Education.
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ProQuest CentralInternational multidisciplinary database indexing a selection of journals in all subject disciplines. It is useful for a broad cross-disciplinary search, rather than in-depth in a subject.
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SAGE Journals OnlinePublishes over 460 journals in Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science.
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Taylor & Francis Online JournalsA multidisciplinary database, includes humanities, social sciences and education.
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Wiley Online LibraryWiley Online Library hosts the world's broadest and deepest multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. Wiley Online Library delivers seamless integrated access to over 6 million articles from over 1500 journals, over 19,000 online books, and hundreds of reference works, laboratory protocols and databases.
Citation Databases can be used for cited reference searches, enabling you to find, check and track citation data year-by-year, navigating forward and backward through the literature related to a particular topic.
You can use citation databases to:
- Identify highly cited works related to a particular topic
- Find related works that share references or authors
- Create search alerts to keep up to date
- Compare the performance of journals in a particular subject area.
Databases
SCImago Journal Rankings is an open access database which uses citation data from the Scopus database to rank journals across a range of measures.
SciVal (by Elsevier) provides customised research performance metrics and collaboration data on organisations, individual researchers or groups of researchers. SciVal uses the Scopus database publication, citation and usage data in all its calculations.
Scopus is a multidisciplinary abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings
Web of Science (by Thomson Reuters) is an abstract and citation index which searches over 12,000 journal titles and 148,000 conference proceedings. Social Science & Humanities Index (1990-present); Emerging Sources Citation Index (2015-present); Current Chemical Reactions (1985-present) and Index Chemicus (1993-present).It indicates times cited, cited and citing references; Citation map displays who cited whom visually.
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FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (online journal)
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The Forensic Examiner (till 2013)
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Journal of Social Issues
Using Databases
| What is a Database? |
A Database is a collection of information, mostly academic - research or scholarly in nature. It can contain information that is specific to a discipline (such as the CINAHL Database) or multidisciplinary (such as the Taylor & Francis Online Journals Database). Importantly the information is indexed so that you, the user, can easily find credible information to support your research or assignment.
| Getting Started Using Databases |
These Database Search Strategy Worksheets help provide structure to finding information for your Assignments. They help you break your assignment topic into parts, and consider alternative terms or key words for each part. They also provide guidance on using smart searching techniques and identifying search parameters, such as refining your search by date or information type.
use when searching for journal articles on a topic
The next tabs provide a cheatsheet of shortcuts for the three main database providers, and Google Scholar.
The main "cheats" are to use Truncation and Wildcard symbols, along with standard search techniques like Boolean AND / OR / NOT and Fields like "Subject Heading" and "Author" to search through their millions of articles.
| Function | Symbol(s) | Example |
| Truncation | * auto completes all possible ends to your root word or fragment | comput* will find computer OR computing |
| Wildcard | ? replaces a single existing character |
ne?t finds neat, nest OR next EBSCOhost does not find net because the wildcard replaces a single character. |
| # use in places where an alternate spelling may contain and add an extra character |
colo#r will find color OR colour N.B. plurals and possessives of that term are not searched when using # Use Truncation from the shared root word or fragment of word |
| Function | Symbol | Example |
| Truncation | * auto searches all possible completions to your root word or fragment | test* finds test, tests, tester, etc. |
| Wildcard | ? replaces a single character | a?t finds act, ant, apt, art, etc. |
| * use in places where alternate spelling may add and contain extra character(s) | colo*rful finds colourful OR colourful |
| Function | Symbol | Example |
| Truncation | * auto searches all possible completions to your root word or fragment | test* finds: test, tests, tester, etc. |
| Wildcard | ? replaces a single character | wom?n finds: woman and women. Searching for: t?re will find tire, tyre, tore, etc. |
Google Scholar is a search engine that indexes the content of scholarly material published on the Internet and in electronic journals.
Make sure to add "Edith Cowan University Library" to your "Library links" under "Settings" so it will link back to our paid journal and database subscriptions via the "Find it @ ECU" links.
Also, check out the "Cited by ..." link below each search result, to view subsequent research.
For more information, see the Search Engines and Library Databases Library Guide.
Database Tutorial Videos
The videos below will help you use the ECU databases to find Legislation (Lawlex), and case law (Lexis Advance and Westlaw AU).
- Lexis+ (previously Lexis Advance) This link opens in a new window
Online legal research platform covering Australian and international case law, legislation, commentary, journals, news and precedents. Results are comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date. Includes the CaseBase legal citator and Halsbury's Laws of Australia encyclopaedia.
- Westlaw This link opens in a new window
Online legal research platform covering Australian and international case law, legislation, commentary, journals, news and precedents. Results are comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date. Includes the Laws of Australia encyclopaedia, the KeyCite (previously FirstPoint) legal citator, and a KeyNumber legal topic classification system. See Westlaw - International Materials for international legal sources.