Criminal Justice 185: Majoring in Criminology & Criminal Justice - Hansen

Scholarly articles are the bread and butter of a lot of the research you will be asked to do as a student at WCU. They are not inherently better than any other genre of writing, but they do have a specific purpose and unique production/publication process that results in an end product that looks much different from other writing with which you may be familiar.

Follow the "Scholarly and Non-scholarly Periodicals" Prezi to learn more about the differences between scholarly and non-scholarly articles, read through the steps of how to search for articles, and then use the links in the Databases subpage to start searching for scholarly articles on a given topic. If you would like to learn more about the peer review process and its important role in scholarly literature, watch the "Peer Review in 3 Minutes" video.

For more information about scholarly and non-scholarly sources, follow the links below.

Step One: In the Databases box at the bottom of this page, select a database to start your search (both Criminal Justice Database and SocINDEX are great starting points). 

Step Two: Use 2-5 keywords to start your search. Your keywords should be the most important words around your research topic. Start broad at first with just a couple keywords and then add additional keywords to the search to narrow your results. Look at the two screenshots below and note how the addition of another search term in the second screenshot has dramatically reduced the number of results.

Step Three: Use the limiters on the left side of the results page to narrow your search results to scholarly journals.

Step Four: When you find an article that seems like a good fit for your research, click on the link to see the full text. The links for full text typically look like those highlighted below.

Step Five: Read the article's abstract. If it seems relevant and meets your needs, move to Step Six. If it doesn't seem relevant, go back to Step Four and try again.

Step Six: You'll want to save relevant articles to refer to later. The menu of options will differ with each database or journal package. Below is an example of the options you might see:

For this article, you can download and save a PDF, print the article, email it to yourself, or select all options to see additional ways to save the article. You can also auto-generate a citation in a number of styles. Caution: Always double-check the citation before you use it. They are not guaranteed to be 100% correct every time.

Final Thoughts: Often when you open a link in an academic database, the content you see is session-specific. That means if you leave your browser tab open for too long, copy/paste the URL from the search bar, or bookmark the page the article is on, you may lose it. If you want to ensure you'll be able to get back to the article later, always use the permanent link option (it usually looks like a chain, see below).