PB1200: Information Resources in Public Justice
Information Research Basics

Preparation: Choosing a Topic, Etc.

Classes of Information: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary

Patterns of Information Flow: Informal, Formal

Preparation

Choosing a Topic

Most research papers in public justice, and just about every other field require a review of the literature. A review of the literature is simply a search to find all the previous research and theory on a particular topic. When you begin to write a research paper in public justice, think about your interests and how they might relate to the area you are studying. Writing about a subject that especially interests you will make the process much more enjoyable and enliven your writing.

Popular topics for public justice can often be found by checking recent newspapers and news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News & World Report. More scholarly topics can be located by browsing journals like Criminal Justice Ethics, Criminal Justice & Behavior, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, or the Journal of Criminal Justice. (Recollect that magazines and journals can be found on the first floor of the Academic Library organized alphabetically by title.) Scan the journal indexes for interesting and important topics of concern. Chapter headings in your textbooks may suggest areas for research. Subject encyclopedias can be good sources of topics as well as good starting points for investigation.

Whether you pick your own topic or it is assigned to you, you may need to narrow your scope. For a summary of information on your topic and for ideas on narrowing it, it is often helpful to begin with a good subject encyclopedia and locate the articles that pertain to your subject. Use the index to find your subject; don't rely solely on alphabetical order of articles in the encyclopedia because you may miss important sources.

Drafting an Outline

Thinking and planning are vital parts of the research process that can save time later in the process. Drafting a preliminary outline will help you in the research process by suggesting different aspects of your topic to investigate. Even if you did not use a subject encyclopedia in the process of choosing and narrowing your topic, consult one for help in writing a preliminary outline. List questions or concepts concerning your topic rather than specific facts since you probably do not have enough information at this stage to be very specific. This is only a preliminary outline that will help you drive the research process rather than necessarily being an outline of the final product.

Building a Bibliography

When you locate materials that are useful to you, write down the full bibliographic information for the items. Do not be too evaluative during your first search for information but write down the bibliographic information for everything that may be useful. During your later writing and evaluations, you can discard unnecessary material. It is much more difficult to find the material a second time without the proper bibliographic information.

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Ref/BF/76.7/P83/1994) is the generally accepted style manual for public justice. Familiarize yourself with the citation format used by this manual so that you can gather the appropriate data needed for your bibliography. Use this for the format of your paper unless your instructor gives you other style guidelines. See APA Format for Citations for a brief introduction to APA format.

Summarizing the Information

Writing guides often recommend 3 x 5 inch index cards for the purpose of taking notes. This may or may not be the right method for you since everyone differs in their approach to note-taking. Many people use photocopies of the original materials rather than taking notes on them. This can save time in the gathering of the information but it makes the task of summarizing the information more difficult by placing it entirely at the end of the process. You also need to be sure to write down the exact bibliographical information on photocopies so that you can cite the information properly in your paper.

Be sure you do not plagiarize the words of the original author in your summaries. Analyze and summarize the information in your own words in order to help yourself understand it more fully. Making an outline can also be helpful if the material is lengthy.

Writing the Paper

Once you have gathered, read and digested all the information available to you in this way, you are ready to begin writing your paper. Go back and revise your original outline if necessary. If you are doing original research based on the information gathered, you should now be ready to formulate your hypothesis, design your experiment, and gather data.

Three Classes of Information

A knowledge of different kinds of information and of the general pattern of how information is generated will help you organize your research. If you understand how information comes into being and how it is categorized and organized, you will more easily be able to find it. There are three defined sources of information: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary sources of information are raw data without interpretation. Examples of primary data might be a fingerprint left at the scene of a crime, a completed survey form returned to a poll taker, or a verbatim transcript of a trial. Primary data can vary in its form from one discipline to another.

Secondary sources of information involve selection, evaluation, analysis, and/or synthesis of other data. The data to be synthesized can be other sources of primary or secondary data or a combination of both. Secondary data syntheses often are published as books or journal articles but one can find primary data in books and articles as well.

Tertiary literature involves the building of research tools to organize the literature of a field. The indexes which are used to locate journal articles are an example of tertiary literature. Another example of tertiary literature might be an annotated bibliography of journal articles on a particular subject. This is the final level of selection, evaluation, analysis, and/or synthesis of the literature in a field.

Information Flow

Formal vs. Informal Communication

Information is available to researchers through both formal and informal communications. Publication of research results in book or journal format is a form of formal communication and is available to the public. This type of information generally constitutes the literature of a field of study. Informal communication can take the form of a discussion between friends or correspondence between colleagues and though it may not necessarily be secret information, it is not generally available to anyone outside the informal network. Informal communication with other people interested in particular topics is coming to be more widely available to people through the use of email and group discussion via the Internet. Geographic location is thus becoming less of a limiting factor in informal communications.

Patterns of Information Flow

Information flow usually begins with discussions with the informal communications network between friends and colleagues in the field. As more formal research begins, announcements may be placed in newsletters or newspapers to request volunteers as subjects for research or to announce the receipt of a grant for a particular project. This information is part of the formal network of communications and can sometimes be located through indexes and abstracts though sometimes the newsletters are ephemeral and are not indexed or the announcements themselves are not indexed though the remainder of the newsletter may be.

Interim reports on the progress of research are generally submitted to granting agencies to show progress made on monetary grants. Interim reports are often not accessible to the public though interim reports to government agencies are sometimes published on the Internet. One of the first places that final research results are announced is often a conference of professional scholars. Conference presentations are accessible when conference proceedings are published. Otherwise these may also be unavailable to the public.

Finally, depending on the extent and purpose of the study, journal articles or books are written as the final end product. Journal articles are often an intermediate step in the transfer of information to books. For many disciplines, including public justice, journal articles are the key for initial transmittal of ideas and conclusions within the scholarly community. Journal articles are most easily found through the use of appropriate indexes or abstracting tools.

Books are usually summaries of information first published in different journal articles, though as noted previously, in some cases they can take the place of journal articles. When new information becomes integrated into a discipline and is well-accepted, it is usually summarized in encyclopedia articles. At this point, when information is presented in books and encyclopedias, it is effectively integrated into the knowledge base of the field.

Information Flow Summary

Informal Communications: Discussion between colleagues & friends regarding ideas Formal Communications: Published information regarding ongoing research or results

In doing library research, you can use this model of information flow as a guide. It is usually best to begin your research with subject encyclopedias to get an overview of the topic and a summary of well-accepted information. Then you can move on to books to get an in-depth look at the topic, and finally use journal articles to update your information with recent research results. Conference reports and interim reports can be used to find the most recent research but they are often unavailable or difficult to locate. Newspaper and newsletter announcements can be used to locate other researchers in the field for further informal discussions about the topic.

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This web site was created by Margaret Sylvia (msylvia@stmarytx.edu) to educate Public Justice students at St. Mary's University in the use of information resources.
Created August 1998. Last modified