Searching for Systematic Crime Prevention Evidence

• In Event: Doing Systematic Reviews in Crime Prevention

Abstract

Systematic reviews require each step of the research process to be conducted in a methodical and transparent way. This presentation focuses on the procedure of searching for systematic review evidence across the broadly defined field of crime prevention. This field ranges from the vast offender treatment literature (with considerable overlap with substance misuse treatment research); through to early interventions focusing on the family unit, to the supposed deterrent effect that is enacted by legislation and criminal justice agencies. Many policy decisions are made based on the evidence base for crime prevention, hence marshalling the variety of systematically conducted studies on one platform is a timely and valuable contribution to criminology.This presentation covers the generation of search terms to encapsulate the complexity of the range of crime prevention studies, the translation of these into search syntax (including using database-specific wildcard and proximity operators), and the refining of search results. A perennial priority in the electronic search for academic literature is balancing sensitivity (i.e. casting a wide enough net so that all relevant studies are retrieved) with precision (the proportion of relevant studies to all studies retrieved). This presentation will report the first empirical results of optimising this balance with the criminological literature.

Authors

• Lisa Tompson, University College London

• Jyoti Belur, University College London