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Criminology and Justice: Journals & Databases

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?
Note: Please see the videos below for using Lawlex, Lexis Advance, and Westlaw AU for Legislation search, and Case Law search.
AGIS Plus Text is developed in partnership with the Attorney-General’s Information Service Australia and is an authoritative collection of legal resources developed for the legal profession and for the study of Commonwealth-based law. Informit AGIS Plus Text is only available via Informit. It is a comprehensive collection of abstracts and articles for primary legal research in comparative and Commonwealth law.

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.

Note: The InfoRMIT Databases are Australian-centric, and provide strong coverage of our region.
Case law database
Case law database

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:

  1. Identify highly cited works related to a particular topic
  2. Find related works that share references or authors
  3. Create search alerts to keep up to date
  4. 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.

Using Databases

A-Z 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  or multidisciplinary. 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.

 

 EBSCOhost Database

Using truncation, wildcards and other operators in a search:

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

 Informit Database

Using truncation, wildcards and other operators in a search:

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

 Proquest Database

Using truncation, wildcards and other operators in a search:

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 video below will help you use the ECU databases to find case law (Lexis+ and Westlaw AU).

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