Research Guide for Forensic Science

• Finding Articles
• Finding Authoritative Web Sites
• Finding Books, Videos, DVDs, & CDs
• Online Books

FINDING ARTICLES

EBSCO Multiple Topics & Disciplines

Academic Search ™ Premier contains full text coverage in a broad array of subjects including biology, chemistry, physics, education, health, psychology, religion & theology, and social work. Academic Search ™ Premier contains indexing for 8,200 publications, with full text for more than 4,650 of those titles.

Additional Databases With Forensic Science Sources

Psychology

EBSCO's Psychology searches three databases, PsycINFO ®, PsycARTICLES, and the multidisciplinary Academic Search ™ Premier. Searches can be limited to the PsycINFO database by going to EBSCO Database Selection. This will allow you to search using an electronic version of APA's official Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms ® .

Sociology

EBSCO's Sociology databases searches SocINDEX™ with Full Text and the multidisciplinary Academic Search ™ Premier. SocINDEX™ with Full Text encompasses the broad spectrum of sociological study with abstracts for more than 815 "core" coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. The full text for 397 "core" and 150 "priority" coverage journals dating back to 1908, are covered. Books/monographs, conference papers, and other non-periodical content sources are also included. You can search individual databases by going to EBSCO Database Selection . Additional search features are provided when you limit your search to a single data.

ProQuest Criminal Justice Periodical Index

This database covers a broad range of criminal justice topics, including corrections administration, law enforcement, social work, industrial security, drug rehabilitation, and criminal and family law. Most of the citations in these databases link to the full text of the article.

National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine Gateway facilitates the simultaneous search of multiple National Library of Medicine information systems, including MEDLINE and PubMed. Users can access citations - some of which link to full text, video, audio and images.

LexisNexis Academic

Legal Research
This full text database includes case law, law reviews, legal news, state and federal codes, federal regulations, European Union law and patents.

Medical News 47 Titles
This is a database of full text articles in the fields of life sciences, medicine, & health. (Dates of coverage: varies by title, all titles to present)

Medical Journals 20 Titles
This is an index of full-text journal articles in fields of life sciences, medicine, & health. (Dates of coverage: varies by title, 11 titles to present)

Medical Abstracts
This is an index to the abstracts of journal articles in the National Library of Medicine's Medline (Dates of coverage: 1966-present)

News
This database includes U.S. & International news from newspapers, magazines, journals, television and radio news broadcasts.

WestLaw Campus Research

WestLaw Research Campus is an online legal research tool for students interested in law-related areas such as criminal justice, social work, business, education and law. In addition to primary legal information consisting of case law, and state and federal statutes, this resource provides summaries and analysis of court decisions, law reviews, and synopsis of legal issues.

Please note that in order to access this database, WestLaw requires users to check the I agree button at the bottom of the terms of agreement page.   

FINDING AUTHORITATIVE WEB SITES

Franco Library’s Internet Reference Library

The Internet Reference Library has a list of selected Forensic Science Web sites. The Internet Reference Library can be accessed from the Resources page of the Library Web site.

Alvernia Library Research Page

The Research Guides page, listed under Research Help on the Alvernia Library Research page, links to sources for finding and evaluating Web sites.

Brodart DartClix

The Brodart DartClix consists of 16,000 professionally selected Web sites.

FINDING BOOKS, VIDEOS, DVDS, & CDS

WorldCat 100 million records

This Online Union Catalog lists holdings from libraries across the world. Searches can be conducted across all libraries or limited to the Alvernia Library collection. Searches can also be limited to specific types of documents such as books, visual materials and Internet resources. (dates of coverage: 2100 B.C. – present)

Requesting a book from this collection only takes a minute. Click on the Borrow this item from another library link. Submit the form with your Alvernia ID number and allow two weeks for delivery of the requested book.

Alvernia's Catalog

Alvernia's Catalog is the best tool for finding items in Alvernia Library's collection. You can search for books, audiobooks, books in the Best Seller collection, audio-visual materials (videos, DVD's and CD's), course reserves, and journals in our print collection. Item records indicate if the item is available. Students, faculty and staff with an Alvernia ID card can place a hold on items that are currently in circulation.

A good way to start your research is to read brief overviews about your topic. Reference books provided an overview as well as a sense of the scope of a topic, and introduce terms that may be helpful in searching for additional information. Examples of books with background information and reference sources are listed below:

Reference Collection

Environmental Forensics R344.7304 M881 2000

Encyclopedia of Forensic Science R363.25 C752 2002

Encyclopedia of Forensic Science R363.25 E56 2000

Forensic Science Handbook R363.25 F715 2002

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology R503 M1478

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms R503 M147 2003

CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics R541 C517 2002

Current Protocols in Toxicology R615.9 C976

ONLINE BOOKS

NetLibrary eBooks

A collection of over 12,000 eBooks is now accessible from NetLibrary. eBooks are full text electronic versions that can be borrowed and returned over the Internet. To access eBooks from off-campus, you must first Create A Free Account from a computer on the Alvernia University computer network.

Several examples of ebooks on addictions include:

• Incident Response & Computer Forensics (2003)
• Privacy Protection and Computer Forensics (2004)
• A Question of Evidence: A Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, From Napoleon to O.J. (2003)
• Scene of the Cybercrime: Computer Forensics Handbook (2002)
  

Biomedical books

Updated: September 4, 2008

Your comments are welcome.