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Criminal Justice

This guide is an introduction into Criminal Justice research and resources.

Welcome

stone statue of Lady Justice holding scales

Welcome to the research guide for Criminal Justice.

Overview of the Criminal Justice Research Guide

This subject guide provides information on Criminal Justice resources available from UNT Libraries.

  • Reference sources, such as encyclopedias, handbooks and dictionaries, are a good place to start your research because they provide:
    • background on a topic
    • historical research
    • potential keywords for your catalog and database searches
  • Books in both print and electronic format provide:
    • in-depth coverage of a topic, broad in scope and usually historical
    • information that is two to three years old by the publication date
    • indexes where you can check if the book contains your topic
  • Articles provide:
    • the most current source of peer-reviewed information
    • focused research, narrow in scope
    • literature reviews
  • Government documents, such as congressional hearings, laws, and agency reports in both print and electronic format, provide:
    • information on legislative or regulatory aspects of a topic
    • detailed studies of criminal justice issues with national impact
  • Statistics, most of which are collected by government agencies, primarily in the Department of Justice, provide
    • statistical sources from the national to the local level
    • data on specific crimes, offenders, victims, and the operations of justice systems at all levels of government
  • Videos, in both DVD and online/streaming formats
    • in-depth coverage of a topic
    • information presented in a way that makes it up close and personal
  • Websites must be evaluated for credibility, authority and accuracy before using and provide:
    • the most current information on a topic (but not necessarily peer-reviewed)
    • obscure, hard-to-find information

If you need additional help, please drop by one of the library services desks, in Willis or Sycamore Library, or contact the Criminal Justice librarian.

Putting It All Together

These subject guides can help you organize your research, prepare a literature review and use RefWorks to store article and book citations and prepare your bibliography:

Copyright © University of North Texas. Some rights reserved. Except where otherwise indicated, the content of this library guide is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Suggested citation for citing this guide when adapting it:

This work is a derivative of "Criminal Justice", created by [author name if apparent] and © University of North Texas, used under CC BY-NC 4.0 International.

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