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Criminal Justice Research Guide

Pre-Research

Gathering background information is an important step for any topic you're studying in your Criminal Justice course. This is called pre-research. 

Pre-research will provide you with a good understanding of a broad topic so you can identify keywords, narrow down the topic, and form a thesis statement or research question.

For example, criminal law is a broad topic and can span local, state, and federal jurisdictions, and cover punishment, rehabilitation, and more. You may choose to focus your criminal law research on prison reform.

Google can be a good tool to help you identify more keywords. You’re just looking for ideas and inspiration at this point, not sources.

As you do your pre-research, be sure to take notes! Seeing your keywords written down can help you make connections between keywords and ideas, which may then help you form a thesis statement and identify supporting arguments or evidence.

Using eBooks

Online reference books (eBooks) are helpful for finding background information because they contain a lot of information about your topic all in one place. eBooks can be found in our library databases and are available at any time without a library card. Here are just a few of our eBook databases to get you started.

For more eBooks, please visit our A to Z Databases and sort the database Types by eBooks.