Doing an online literature review

DOING AN ONLINE LITERATURE REVIEW

Pretty much every piece of criminological research – whether it’s a student disserta- tion or a large-scale academic research project – inevitably begins with a literature review, intended to draw upon the existing body of scholarship in order to set the foundations for your own particular study (Jesson et al., 2011). Students nowadays are, of course, used to making internet searches as a typical starting point when seeking to answer a question or learn more about a specific topic, theoretical frame- work or approach. However, the inevitable problem confronting the researcher is not one of quantity but of quality; there is no shortage of online material covering just about every imaginable criminological topic, but ensuring that the resources you draw on are credible or accurate is a real challenge. One of the internet’s great strengths – its ability to allow any and all users to transcend barriers to publication and share content – is also a weakness, insofar as material made available online is often not subject to rigorous evaluation or fact-checking. Nevertheless, the internet offers many valuable instruments for undertaking the literature review stage of your research project. The basis for this stage is twofold – first, you need to identify lit- erature that is relevant to your research; and second, you need to be able to access it. Universities will offer their staff and students access to searchable electronic databases of scholarly publications, such as the ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus, which can be used to find journal articles relevant to your research topic. However, accessing the articles themselves is dependent on your university or college paying the required subscription fees for the particular journals in question. Many students and academics will be familiar with the frustration of identifying a key piece of lit- erature, only to find that their institution’s portfolio of subscriptions doesn’t include the particular one in which the article is published. The good news is that the pro- liferation of web-based academic content means that students and scholars have a number of other, freely available, avenues for finding and accessing relevant litera- ture. One of the most popular is the Google Scholar search engine, which indexes scholarly literature and enables users to identify similar or related works, as well as directing users to the complete documents in those instances that they are available online. A significant portion of the literature (journal articles, book reviews, discus- sion documents and conference papers) is made available either by universities in their own institutional repositories, or by individual researchers and writers them- selves (Khabsa and Giles, 2014). In the case of the latter, an increasing number of authors make their work available for download on academic social networking platforms such as academia. edu and ResearchGate; the latter, for example, boasts more than 10 million researcher members and hosts many millions of articles which can be searched by author, keyword or topic; membership is free, and open to stu- dents. Such web-based search engines and platforms offer criminologists an invaluable resource for undertaking a literature review, and crucially provide access to research on a free basis.

FINDING CRIMINOLOGICAL DATA ONLINE

In addition to accessing material for your literature review, the internet provides a rich variety of crime-related data (both quantitative and qualitative) that you can draw upon and use in your own work. Such secondary data (data that has already been collected by other researchers) can cover a wide range of criminological topics, such as nationwide patterns and trends in offending and victimization; social atti- tudes towards crime and justice issues; the practice of policing, punishment and rehabilitation; and data related both to particular crime types (such as drug-related offences) and particular social groups (such as young people). UK-related data of this kind is accessible online via the UK Data Archive (www. data-archive. ac. uk), as well as the Office for National Statistics (www. ons. gov. uk). Similar data sources are avail- able for the USA through the likes of the National Institute for Justice, the National Archive for Criminal Justice Data, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. International and comparative statistics about crime are available online via the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), spanning topics including organized crime, terrorism, the narcotics trade, fraud, money laundering and human trafficking. Valuable crime-related data is also available in the form of studies conducted by charitable organizations (such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Howard League for Penal Reform). Private organizations and businesses also collect and com- pile crime-related data and make it available online, especially in respect of internet-related offences such as the distribution of computer malware, and the hack- ing and theft of private information; for example, the internet security company Symantec publishes an annual Internet Security Threat Report which supplies crimi- nologists with useful statistical information about trends in computer crime.

One of the major advantages of using resources such as those referred to above in

your research is that, in addition to ease of access, it enables you to make use of data that would otherwise be impossible for you to collect due to the barriers of cost, time, expertise or access to the sampled populations. However, as with all such data, secondary resources found online are not without their problems and limitations. First, there may be a lack of transparency about precisely how that data has been collected and organized by the original researcher. Second, it may not be entirely suited to answering your own research questions, if, for example, some key variables (such as say gender, age or ethnicity) are absent. Third, when using a number of such secondary data sources, there are inevitable problems of inconsistency in methodol- ogy which make it difficult to compare or aggregate the findings (May, 2011). Data about crime patterns and trends compiled by private actors and business organiza- tions also needs to be handled with care, as it may be decisively shaped by commercial interests that lead to bias (Wall, 2007). One example of such problems relates to the overestimation of the costs incurred through online media ‘piracy’, with data compiled by bodies representing media companies standing accused of consistently inflating figures for rhetorical purposes (in this instance, pushing the

case for harsher criminal sanctions for those committing copyright offences) (Yar, 2005). Consequently, such data must be placed in its appropriate context rather than being accepted at face value by the criminological researcher.