Law

Reference Resources | Core Databases | Additional Databases | Current Periodicals

Reference Resources

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences available via ScienceDirect to researchers with a Penn State Access Account.

Legal Encyclopedias
Legal encyclopedias provide discussions of legal topics. Annotations included with each entry refer to court case reporters, statutes and digests of court cases.

Legal Reference, Commentary, and Topical Resources

West's Encyclopedia of American Law
Also available online via the Gale Virtual Reference Library to researchers with a Penn State Access Account.

Core databases

Annual Reviews
see series Law and Social Science
Annual Reviews is a collection of comprehensive critical reviews written by leading scientists in the fields. Articles are heavily cited and highly ranked in terms of impact factors. Coverage is back to 1996, and is updated yearly. Available to researchers with a Penn State Access Account.

Criminal Justice Abstracts
Provides abstracts of articles from the major journals in criminology and related disciplines, as well as books and reports from government and nongovernmental agencies. For each document, an informative summary of the findings, methodology, and conclusions is provided. Topics include crime trends, prevention projects, corrections, juvenile delinquency, police, courts, offenders, victims, and sentencing.

Index to Legal Periodicals
Indexes legal journals, law reviews, yearbooks, and bar association publications from the early 1980s to the present. Coverage also includes books and full-text of selected articles from the early 1990s to the present.

LegalTrac
Use LegalTrac to find articles in law reviews, law journals, specialty law and bar association journals, and legal newspapers. Includes articles on federal, state and international law. The database includes the full text of some journals also.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
Subject areas include corrections, courts, drugs and crime, law enforcement, juvenile justice, crime statistics, and victims of crime. Coverage: The time period covered is from the early 1970s to the present.

PsychInfo
Primary database for international literature in psychology and related disciplines. It is published by the American Psychological Association and provides coverage from 1840 to the present.

Sociological Abstracts
Seminal index for English language journals in Sociology, Social Work, and other Social Sciences. Provides abstracts for articles and is international in scope. Coverage: 1963 to the present.

Westlaw Campus
Westlaw Campus is an academic version of the legal database, Westlaw. Users can search the full-text of federal and state cases, statutes and administrative codes, as well as American Jurisprudence 2d, American Law Reports, and hundreds of law journals.

Additional Databases

Social Sciences Citation Index
The Index can be used to look up either a specific author or a particular publication to see how many articles in the database cited that author or publication. The Index can also be used to find related articles (articles that have at least one reference in common).

ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)
Access to the world's largest archive of computerized social science data, Training facilities for the study of quantitative social analysis techniques, Resources for social scientists using advanced computer technologies.

Current Periodicals

Criminal Law Forum (International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law)
Serves the global community of criminal law scholars and practitioners. Dedicated to the advancement of criminal law theory, practice, and reform throughout the world. "A publication pursuant to an agreement between the [International] Society for the Reform of Criminal Law and Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, NJ".

European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice
Provides an international forum for the discussion of policy and research relating to crime, criminal law and criminal justice in a European context, including coverage of European institutions, case law of the European Court and European Commission on Human Rights, European Communities policies and activities.

Federal Sentencing Reporter
Explores in detail the complex sector of sentencing law, practice and theory. Along with the presentation of new ideas and viewpoints on existing legislation and sentencing guidelines, the journal examines questions of sentencing policy and the practical application of modern sentencing reforms.

Legal and Criminological Psychology
Published by the British Psychological Society, this journal covers theoretical, empirical and review studies in the field as broadly defined. Topics include new legislation, victimology, theories of delinquency, public attitudes, mental health and the law, policing and crime detection.