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Criminal Justice

This guide will help you research Criminal Justice topics with the use of databases, online resources, and statistics.

Scholarship as a Conversation

In 2003, ACRL defined scholarly communication as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs." Scholarly communication is frequently defined or depicted as a lifecycle documenting the steps involved in the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of a piece of scholarly research. 

scholarly communications lifecycle

Citation Tracing Tools

Tracing Citations Forward

If you want to know how other authors have responded to a specific article, you can look at who has cited the article since it was published. All you have to do is search for the article title in Google Scholar (link below) and then click on the "cited by" link below the search result.

Screenshot of Google Scholar

Finding Articles based on Citations

1. Do you have a full citation? If not, search for the article title in Google Scholar (link below) and then use the citation tool underneath the search result for the article. Take particular note of the journal title, year, volume number, and issue number.

Screenshot of Google Scholar search

2. Once you have a full citation, search for the journal title using Forsyth Library's E-Journal List (link below). We don't search for the article title because not all of our journals are "indexed" (broken down by article) in the Forsyth Library catalog.

E-Journal Search Screenshot

3. Click on the journal title in the E-Journal List and scroll down to "View It." Look at the date ranges listed for each database and choose one that includes the date of your article.

Screenshot of "view it" section of journal record

4. In the database record for the journal, there will be a list of years, volumes, and issues. Choose the issue in which your article was published.

Screenshot of issue list for journal