E-Reference Ratings: Law & Crime

CQ Press Supreme Court Collection. CQ Press. www.cqpress.com 

Having already earned positive reviews from LJ, Choice, and the American Bar Association, this unique and comprehensive database offers a wide variety of information on everything that is the Supreme Court, including biographies of the current and past justices, portrait galleries, membership rosters, and timetables of court appointments and landmark cases. In addition to the 5000 case summaries and the 8000 opinion and voting results, users will find the information to be exceptionally supplemented by links to related government and legal web sites. Full-text access is available externally through the Findlaw web site. Even more impressive are the analytical features of the well-designed interface. For example, researchers can investigate the historical voting trends of justices and study the breakdown by constitutional area or topic on which justices wrote opinions.

Criminal Justice Abstracts (CJA). CSA. www.csa.com

Indexing more than 100,500 records (as of summer 2009), CJA is one of the most comprehensive databases available covering the field of criminology, with access to more than 640 journals, books, reports, and dissertations dating back to 1968. Some of the more prominent topics covered include adult corrections, courts and the legal process, police, and substance abuse. Despite the lack of full text, users will appreciate the descriptive and lengthy abstracts that accompany the majority of entries. However, if the index and abstracts are not enough, consider purchasing CJA's full-text sister product, Criminology, as a supplement. Basic and advanced search options cater to novice and experienced users alike; however, where other platforms are embracing 2.0 capabilities, Illumina is making little progress in the areas of academic social networking and bookmarking.

Criminal Justice Collection (CJC). Gale Cengage. www.gale.cengage.com

Complementing rather than competing with ProQuest's CJPI (below), CJC provides indexing and abstracting to more than 150 journals, over half of which are also available in full text, including Corrections Caselaw Quarterly, Forensic Examiner, and Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The InfoTrac platform highlights tabbed searching, browsing, and results interfaces that automatically display relevant hits by publication type, including academic journals, magazines, books, newspapers, and multimedia. In addition to printing out the full text of articles in HTML or PDF format, users can also email or bookmark search results for future reference and export citations into bibliographic software like EndNote, ProCite, or RefWorks. Pricing is very attractive considering the amount of full text included. The files date back to 1980 and are updated daily.

Criminal Justice Periodicals Index (CJPI). ProQuest. www.proquest.com

Dating back to 1981, CJPI indexes and abstracts 250 titles supporting a variety of areas of the criminal justice field such as law enforcement, corrections, rehabilitation, and industrial security—a collection that would be ideal for any academic library supporting similar or related programs. Of the 250 titles indexed, more than 100 are available in full text, including British Journal of Community Justice, Criminology and Public Policy, and Social Pathology, but OpenURL capabilities will increase full-text access depending on individual library subscriptions. The ProQuest platform facilitates basic and advanced searching, and browsing capabilities by topic and by publication. Built-in information management options are limited to emailing single or multiple records to a personal account. However, citation assistance is available for each article for these formats: MLA, APA, AMA, Chicago/Turabian, and Vancouver.

Criminology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection. SAGE. www.sagefulltext.com

Having earned a Choice Outstanding Academic Title nod in 2005, Criminology is an appropriate stand-alone for institutions that offer courses on various criminology subjects but do not necessarily offer a degree in the field. Currently, it provides 100 percent full-text access to 24 journals, among them Crime and Delinquency, European Journal of Criminology, and Probation Journal. Though coverage varies from title to title, some journals include access to a maximum of 87 years of archival issues. Subscribers would get the most value out of this database when used in conjunction with CSA's CJA (above), which provides abstracts for 640 journals. Owing to the large amount of full text, Criminology is pricier than most of the other law products, but it is on a par with other SAGE Full-Text Collections.

Legal Collection. EBSCO. www.ebscohost.com

Criminal justice, international law, organized crime: these are only a few of the subjects covered by the more than 300 titles indexed by Legal Collection. Of the 300 titles, approximately 250 are available in full text, with coverage dating back to 1965. In addition to scholarly journals like The Journal of Controversial Medical Claims, Legal History Review, and Trends in Organized Crime, users will also find access to monographs, trade journals, magazines, current newspapers, and special reports. This vast array of content is enhanced by EBSCO's 2.0 interface, which offers basic, advanced, and visual searching options; filters that can be turned on and off from within a results page; and images that can be previewed before opening a document. This legal database is a useful addition to most collections unless a library already subscribes to its two sister products, Academic Search Premier and Business Source Premier, in which case the library is only missing a handful of titles.

Oxford Reports on International Law (ORIL). Oxford. www.oxfordlawreports.com

Geared toward practicing legal professionals and law schools with strong international components, ORIL is a compendium of five frequently updated modules: Oxford Reports on International Law in Domestic Courts; Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law; Oxford Reports on International Human Rights Law; Oxford Reports on International Courts of General Jurisdiction; and Oxford Reports on International Investment Claims. Individual subscriptions are available for each module; however, the largest price breaks accompany subscriptions to three or more modules. The interface is intuitive and well organized. Both simple and advanced search options are available, with the advanced search screen showcasing the ability to limit a search by headnotes, controlled vocabulary, designated jurisdictions, case names, and dates. The full text of decisions is directly linked within a results screen, and, where appropriate, the text has been translated into English.

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO): Law. Oxford. www.oxfordscholarship.com

With indexing, abstracting, and full text to over 170 legal monographs, OSO: Law is a hefty database covering such topics as medical law, legal history, European Union law, constitutional law, intellectual property, and media law. The platform provides an easy-to-use, no-frills interface that facilitates basic and advanced search techniques. Each book is broken down by chapter to which both an abstract and the full text is linked. “Flipping” through a chapter is as easy as clicking the next or previous buttons. For students familiar with bibliographic software, results can be exported into EndNote, Reference Manager, ProCite, and RefWorks. Both subscription-based and one-time purchase pricing options, calculated by FTE, justly reflect the bulky content, but discounts are available if the collection is bought in full.

Westlaw. Thomson Reuters. www.westlaw.com

An infamous contender among legal databases, Westlaw needs no introduction. With already an outstanding reputation among lawyers, legal professionals, and law students, Westlaw is one of the most powerful legal databases available. Within the Westlaw suite, users will find 13 West products, including Westlaw International, Westlaw Litigator, and Westlaw PeopleMap. These databases provide access to the full text of case laws, state and federal statutes, legal forms, treatises, current newspaper and magazine articles, law journals and reviews, public records, and administrative codes to name a few. When applicable, document records display linked key numbers for easy access to other relevant documents. KeyCite is also available to guide users to more citing references. The interface is quite advanced and may require training for some novices; supplemental print guides may be sufficient for regular use.