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

Database Searching

Tip: Use OR with parentheses ( ) to build synonym sets. Combine those synonym sets with AND

Tip: Use proximity searching to catch variations

literature N3 review (EBSCO)
literature near/3 review (ProQuest)

Tip: Use Thesaurus or Index to identify useful terms for searching

Tracing Citations

Search for articles or subject in citations indexes to understand the influence of ideas and authors.

HINT! Scopus and Web of Science offer "cited by" searching to discover more recent articles that cite your in-hand article and also "related records" searching to discover articles that share bibliographic references with your in-hand article's bibliography.

Scopus
Indexes most peer reviewed journals in science, technology, and medicine, and many in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scopus also includes a number of trade publications and conference papers, and can perform author and affiliation searching.
Web of Science
Indexes journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Allows for cited reference searching. Includes Science Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Search for specific articles by subject, author, journal, and/or author address, as well as for articles that cite a known author or work.
Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.