CRIJ 1301 Intro to Criminal Justice

The purpose of this guide is to help you find information resources for assignments in Ms. Arceo Garza's CRIJ 1301, Introduction to Criminal Justice class. 

For questions about the course and your assignments, please contact your instructor.

For questions about using library resources and citing sources, contact Linda Reeves or any librarian at the Reference Desk, 486-4513. 
 

1.  When researching a topic it is best to select just the main keywords to search, not a whole sentence. 

Not:  What impacts does a natural disaster have on the incidence and types of crime?

Main keywords:  disaster, crime

2.  Boolean Operators are three words (AND, OR, NOT) that combine keywords. AND will narrow a search, OR will broaden a search, and NOT will narrow a search by excluding a keyword. Rather than search a sentence or phrase, it is good to connect main keywords together with AND:

AND:  disaster and crime

OR:  "death penalty" or "capital punishment"

NOT:  "hurricane response" NOT "Red Cross"

3.  Use quotation marks when you want to search words together as a phrase:  "criminal justice"

4. Truncation to save time. Use an asterisk * to take the place of letters in a word so that other forms of the word can be searched at the same time:  crim*     polic*

Sample search expressions:

disaster* and crim*     Searches disaster and disasters, crime, crimes, criminal, criminals

"three strikes" and sentenc*     Searches "three strikes" as a phrase and searches sentence, sentences, sentencing