Administration of Justice

Before you begin looking for resources, spend a few minutes developing a research plan. This can help you focus your ideas and help determine where you should start.

• Look at the assignment
  • What are you being required to create?
  • How many resources do you need?
  • Do you need scholarly sources?
• What are the key topics?
  • Group of Persons
  • Time Period
  • Place (City, State, Region, etc.)
  • Specific Event
  • Specific Law
• Is your topic interdisciplinary?
  • Should you look at other databases if your topic overlaps with history, current event, sociology, or other topic?
• Statistics
  • Do you need to analyze or include statistics?
  • If so, which time period or location do those statistics need to cover?
• Law and Policy
  • Do you need to find specific laws or policies?
  • Dod you need government documents?
• Method
  • What kind of study or analysis are you conducting?
  • What kind of study or analysis do you need?

When you search for articles, books, and other information, you need to use keywords. Below is a list of keywords or categories of keywords that could be used in the library databases. You can use this on their own or mix and match them to narrow your results.

• Civil Liberties
• Community or Communities
• Community Service
• Conflict Resolution
• Correctional Facilities
• Corrections
• Crime
• Criminal Justice
• Criminal Law or Criminal Procedure
• Drugs, Drug Abuse, Drug Trafficking
• Ethnicity
• Gangs
• Gender or Specific Gender
• Hate Crimes
• Homeland Security
• Human Relations
• Human Rights
• Juvenile Offenders
• Juvenile Justice
• Law Enforcement
• Mediation
• Mentor, Mentoring, Mentorship
• Offenders
• Policing and Community Policing
• Public Policy
• Race or Specific Racial Group
• Security
• Sexual Assault, Sexual Abuse, and Sex Trafficking
• Terrorism
• Youth Advocacy

Here are some examples of research methods you may add as key terms/phrases in order to find experimental studies:

• Cross-Sectional Research
• Experiment, Experimental, or Quasi-experimental     
• Longitudinal Study
• Multivariate Analysis     
• Qualitative Research
• Quantitative Research
• Survey Research