CNCM 506 - Understanding & Assessing Conflict

Searching databases can be tricky.  Below you'll find a few search tips that may help you find more accurate results in less time:

Use AND, OR & NOT while searching.

Example: crime AND (woman OR female) 

Use * to truncate your search

Example: Educat* will find education, educate, educated etc.

Use Subject Terms to limit your search

Example: Find a subject (the word(s) the database uses to describe what each article is about) that describes your topic.  Search using this word as a subject to find more accurate results.  In some databases, the most common subjects from your initial search will appear along the side or top of your search results.

Use a thesaurus

Example: Sometimes searching for the word "flu" won't find any results, because all articles refer to it as "influenza."  Keep a thesaurus handy and be ready to use synonyms for your keywords.

Filter your results

Example: Many databases allow searchers to limit their search results by "type" of source.  For example, in a database like Academic Search Premier, you can filter out results from scholarly journals only, or newspapers only etc.  You may also be able to limit your results by date or limit to a specific publication.  If you get too many results, filtering those results is an easy way to get a more manageable number of sources.

Below are a number of databases that may be useful for finding articles in the field of Conflict Management and Negotiation. 

ABI Inform [on-campus] [help]
Coverage: 1970 - present. Indexes more than 1,300 journals on business, management, with 75% full-text.

Academic Search Premier  [on-campus] [help]
Coverage: 1990 - present. Provides full-text for over 3,400 scholarly journals covering the social sciences, humanities, education, sciences, and more. Funded by the Maryland Digital Library (MDL). Need help? Read the Academic Search Premier Visual Guide.

America: History and Life [on campus] [help]
Coverage: 1964 - present. America: History and Life is a complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. The database comprises almost 400,000 bibliographic entries from over 2,000 journals published worldwide. 

Criminal Justice Abstracts [on-campus]
Coverage:  1968 - present. Criminal Justice Abstracts indexes the major journals, books and governmental reports in the areas of criminology and related disciplines. Topics include crime trends, corrections, police, offenders, juvenile delinquency, courts, victims, and sentencing.

Criminal Justice Periodicals[on campus]
1981 to the present: Full-text coverage for 45 of the titles most frequently accessed by criminal justice researchers, and complete indexing and abstracts for another 140 relevant U.S. and international journals.

Criminology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection [on-campus]
Includes the full-text of 23 journals published by SAGE and participating societies, some journals going back 23 years, encompassing over 5,500 articles. It covers such subjects as Criminal Justice, Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, Penology, Policing, Forensic Psychology, and Family and Domestic Violence.
The searchable database consists of bibliographic records (indexed summaries or abstracts) as well as the complete text of each journal article. Every bibliographic record in the Collection links to the appropriate full-text in PDF format.

Historical Abstracts [on campus]
1954 to the present: Information on articles, books, and dissertations about non-U.S. and non-Canadian history from 1450 to the present. Covers more than 2000 journals in 50 languages. Includes links to full text of selected journal articles.

JSTOR [on-campus]
Electronic archive of core journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Includes complete runs of journals with full-text of all articles published prior to the most current five years.

Lexis-Nexis Academic [on-campus] [help]
Coverage: 1970 - present. Features full text of many newspapers and periodicals.  Also offers business news, legal materials such as federal & state codes, case law and legal journals.

Lexis-Nexis Congressional [on-campus]
Coverage: varies. Find congressional publications, legislative histories (1970-present), and track bills. Contains the US Code, voting records, full-text of congressional documents and the Congressional Record, plus the Federal Register (1980 - present) and the CFR.

Military & Government Collection [on-campus]
Coverage: various dates. Designed to offer current news pertaining to all branches of the military and government, this database offers a thorough collection of periodicals, academic journals, and other content pertinent to the increasing needs of those sites. The Military & Government Collection provides cover-to-cover full text for nearly 350 journals and periodicals and indexing and abstracts for nearly 450 titles.

Public Affairs Index [on-campus] [help]
Covers all aspects of national and global contemporary public policy issues.

PsycINFO  [on-campus] [help]
Coverage: 1887 – present. Indexes 1,300 Psychology journals from nearly 50 countries. Also includes abstracts for dissertations, books and book chapters. Same coverage as PsycLit.

Soc Index with full text (Ebsco) [on-campus]
This index features more than 1,300,000 records with subject headings from a 15,600 term sociology-specific thesaurus designed by expert lexicographers. This product also contains informative abstracts for more than 620 "core" coverage journals dating back to 1895. In addition, this file provides data mined from more than 500 "priority" coverage journals as well as over 1,390 "selective" coverage journals. Further, extensive indexing for books, monographs, conference papers, and other sources is included.