National Criminal Justice Thesaurus 1998

• NCJ Number: 168948
• Date Published: 1998
• Length: 429 pages
• Agencies: NCJRS
• Publication Type: Vocabulary/Thesaurus

Annotation

This thesaurus lists the descriptors or terms used to index literature in the National Institute of Justice (NIJ)/National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Abstracts Database maintained by the NIJ's international clearinghouse of criminal justice information.

Abstract

An introduction explains NCJRS and the content and use of the thesaurus. It notes that the NCJRS document collection consists of more than 146,000 books, articles, reports, and nonprint media dealing with the broad spectrum of criminal justice issues. The Abstracts Database contains abstracts of all the documents in the collection. The selection of terms was based on the vocabulary used in the documents, the frequency of term usage in the literature, and the language of the user community. Each term has a descriptor code that consists of a five-digit number used when searching on that term. Notations under each descriptor may include some or all of the following: (1) a scope note that defines or limits the specific use of the term, (2) a "used for" entry that notes other concepts for which the term is used, (3) a "broad term" entry that indicates the larger category to which the term belongs, (4) a "narrow term" entry to indicate a more specific term under the descriptor, and (5) a "related term" to clarify the term's scope or indicate additional points of reference. The thesaurus includes 5,823 substantive terms, 4,117 substantive descriptors, 558 organizational terms, 379 organizational descriptors, 329 geographic terms, and 244 geographic descriptors. Permuted index