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A Simple Guide to Searching the Economics and Criminology Literature Searching the Economics Literature This is fairly straightforward because economics is a large, well-established field with highly organized literature. The major economics database is Econlit, available at most libraries. It is managed directly by the American Economic Association. The major review journal is the Journal of Economic Literature, which also indexes current articles and provides lit reviews. The JEL and Econlit are coordinated. The index category for most crime and economics articles is K - Law and Economics. Also look in category J – Labor and Demographic Economics. The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and Journal of Legal Studies are among the journals that have recently published multiple articles on crime and economics. Economics also has a tradition of releasing working papers before papers are published (publication times are longer in economics than in criminology). The best place to look for working papers is the National Bureau of Economic Research or NBER (www.nber.org). Their website has their working papers available online. There is a fee, but most universities do subscribe to the service. Many professors also make their working papers available at their websites, so if you see an article at NBER and don’t have free access, just visit the author’s website. Searching the Criminology Literature This is a bit harder – criminology is a relatively new field, and it is still small relative to economics with only 20 Ph.D. granting graduate programs. The major literature database is ProQuest’s Criminal Justice Periodicals, which has full text coverage of 45 of the most cited titles in criminology and complete indexing of 140 other journals. Your library may not have it if your school does not have a collection of criminologists. The major review vehicle is an annual publication (since 1979) called Crime and Justice by the University of Chicago Press and edited by Michael Tonry. LexisNexis has started providing full text access to Crime and Justice, from 1997 forward. Most indexes do not treat Crime and Justice as a journal so it can be hard to search with a database. Castine Research Corporation, the editorial office of Crime and Justice, provides an index of abstracts on their web site at http://www.castineresearch.org/new_page_1.htm. These articles are detailed and provide a quick way to get up to speed. Key journals to read include Criminology, Journal on Research on Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology and Law and Society Review. There is not a strong tradition of working papers, although some circulation pre publication does exist at the discretion of the author. |
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The Program on the Economics of Crime and Justice Policy is a joint program of the Departments of Criminology and of Economics and the School of Public Policy and supported by the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. |