1. How do I search for sources about my research topic?
- Identify the keywords of your topic and use those as your search words.
- Each book and article has tags assigned to it, words or shorts phrases that make each book or article searchable
- You want your search words to match those tags.
- Words like impact, effect, or factors are not used as tags
2. How do I focus my search hits to scholarly sources?
In the Refine Your Search sidebar:
- Click on Peer Review
- Click on Journal Article under Content Type
3. I have too many search hits. How do I focus my search hits so that they're more relevant?
- Law and Sociology and Social Interest under Discipline to focus search hits to those relevant to law and sociology
- Click on See more... under Subjects to identify more specific subjects within your research area
- Click on the Subjects in the list that you're interested in
- Scroll back up to the top of the list and click on Apply to focus your search hits to these subjects
4. How do I preview the abstract/summary of articles in the list of search hits?
- Click on Preview below the article description
5. How do I access the article so I can read the whole thing?
- Click on Full Text Online
- Look for pdf Full Text or HTML Full Text links
6. How do I use the search hits to focus to my criminal justice issue?
- Look at the list of Subject Terms under Refine Your Search and see what interests you
- Click on the Subject Terms you're interested in
- When you see articles that look interesting, look at their tags and add those to your search
7. I can't find anything on my iisue. What do I do?
- The search words you're using to describe your topic may not match the tags that have been assigned to books and articles on that topic
- Look through the Subject terms in the Refine Your Search sidebar and check the boxes beside the topic areas that interest you
- When you find an article that looks interesting, look at its assigned tags
- Add any relevant tags to your search
- This will also help you develop your research questions and search for articles about your specific research questions
- There may not be research tying your main ideas together yet
- Try searching for your main ideas separately and linking their findings together
- If you've found one article that's relevant for your topic, look through the sources in its References list to see if any of them are also relevant to your research
