Guides: CRIM 410: Senior Research Seminar: Experiments in Crime and Justice: Research Resources

Secondary Data

Finding numeric and spatial data
In many cases, the data you need has been collected by others. See the link above for strategies on finding data related to your research question.
Criminology Data and Statistics
Resources relevant to criminology.
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
The largest data archive for criminal justice, hosted by ICPSR. Many studies offer online analysis tools for data exploration.
Social Explorer
The easiest way to access demographic data for the United States.
PolicyMap
Easy-to-use online mapping with data on demographics, real estate, health, jobs and more in communities across the US. Permits data uploading.

Data Collection

SAGE Research Methods
Not a research tool in the strict sense, but a very useful compilation of fulltext books and articles on social sciences methodology. Offers handy checklists and a "methods map" to identify works on specific methods and techniques.
Equipment Lending
Audio recorders and camera equipment available for loan at the Weigle Information Commons.
Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an online service for creating and administering surveys. The School of Arts and Sciences has a site license for Qualtrics. SAS faculty, students and staff as well as students enrolled in SAS courses are eligible to use Qualtrics.

If you would like to sign up to use Qualtrics, please go to http://sasupenn.qualtrics.com to signup for an account. Please use your Penn email address (that includes "upenn.edu"). This will create a Qualtrics trial account. SAS faculty staff or students can request a free upgrade to full Qualtrics functionality by sending a request to qualtrics-help@sas.upenn.edu . Include your name and full SAS email address in the request. Upgrading your account will allow you unlimited surveys and results and the ability
SurveyMonkey
A competitor to Qualtrics, better-known but with fewer features.
Institutional Review Board (Penn site)
The committee at Penn that approves human subject research.

Software for Analysis

The following software is available at Van Pelt Library and selected other sites around campus; consult list of labs.

Statistical software
Includes statistical packages like SPSS, Stata, SAS, and R. Provides links to useful training resources (videos, online courses, handouts, library books and ebooks). These pages also point to scheduling requests for the Penn Libraries statistical software consultant.
Geographic Information Systems
ArcGIS and QGIS are available on computers in the library, and other labs around campus. Workshops are offered periodically at the Weigle Information Commons.
NVivo
Qualitative data analysis software available on computers in Van Pelt Library. Workshops on NVivo are offered periodically through Weigle Information Commons.
Other Penn Libraries tools

Citation Management

A research project can generate hundreds of citations from diverse sources. Citation management software can help you save and organize those citations, as well as automatically generate bibliographies. Two popular examples, RefWorks and Zotero, are described below. See our guide for in-depth comparisons.

Web-based tool for extracting citations from databases and creating bibliographies.

Free, open source tool for saving citations in your browser, from databases or web sources.

Data Backup

Penn+Box
50 GBs of free storage available to members of the Penn community. More secure than Dropbox, it allows for version control and sharing of large data files.