My research discovery system, the Explaining Crime tip sheets, and how I made/make them
Also, the new publishing schedule
Hello! I'm Aaron Jacklin, and this is Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you explain crime to your audience.
When I started monitoring new crime research about a year ago, I wanted to report on it journalistically.
With a background in journalism and an MA in criminology, I figured it would be pretty straightforward.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
My research discovery system started as a list of 60+ relevant journals. To narrow that down, I used Google’s ranking of relevant journals to pick 20, then picked another 10 in subject areas that I wanted to keep an eye on. I did everything manually, visiting journal webpages in one browser window and inputting new journal article information into a Google Sheet in another window. I wanted a list of studies to compare and choose from.
Turns out there’s a lot of new research published every day. I couldn’t keep up, especially with my limitations, which I’ve written about elsewhere.
I considered and dismissed a few options, like RSS feeds, email alerts, and a few other options that escape me at the moment. My criteria were strict:
Free, or at least affordable. I’m an independent journalist on a shoestring budget, which means no expensive institutional accounts with each journal publisher.
Comprehensive. I wanted to see all the research.
One-stop service. My attention limits mean that checking multiple services per day exhausts me.
I knew enough about scholarly research not to expect to be able to read entire articles unless they’re open access. The title and abstract are usually enough for me to judge whether I want to report on something.
For months, I made do with workarounds like browser extensions, keyboard shortcuts (especially copy/paste, switch tabs, switch windows…), hand-written code that sped up my work in Google Sheets and Docs, and so on.
Finally, I cracked the problem when I learned about Crossref, a nonprofit organization that journal publishers give publication metadata (e.g. article titles, author information, abstracts, etc.). They let anybody query their database for information, for free. Tweak your queries and you can get exactly what you need.
So I rebuilt my little Google Sheet and wrote code that queries Crossref in the wee hours of every morning for new studies by 61 academic journals related to criminology and criminal justice. The new studies are online-first journal articles published the previous day. The code logs the new studies in the spreadsheet for my review.
This is my research discovery system.
From the spreadsheet, I use additional code and templates I’ve made to create accessible listings of new research from a bunch of different academic journals.
These listings became the tip sheets newsletter subscribers get multiple times per week:
Your First Five, a daily tip sheet (M-F) that publishes a curated selection of recent research related to crime and justice. Each edition contains links to new studies (each related to a single topic) that I hope will enhance your work explaining crime.
The “research directories,” which are listings of new research sorted into categories. The first directories sort research studies by geography based on mentions of locations in journal titles, abstracts, and the institutional affiliations of primary authors. The next versions will sort by topic.
Now that my research discovery system is reaching a basic level of stability, I plan to publish on the following schedule beginning in June 2024:
Geographic and topical directories of the previous week’s research: Mondays (free)
Morning geographic and topical directories of research from the previous couple days: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (paid)
Your FIrst Five:
each weekdayTuesdays and Thursdays1 (free)
With the research discovery system and tip sheets in place, I’ll be able to devote more writing time to “actual” articles for this newsletter and to reporting on research selected from the system.
Final notes on the research directories
Consider the directories to be in beta. I do my best to make sure the studies fit the categories, but expect some categorization errors!
Studies often appear in more than one place in a directory depending on how many categories they fit. This may seem overly repetitive, especially in directories with fewer studies, but this is meant as a feature instead of a bug. Say there’s a study that mentions “St. Louis” and “Missouri.” If we only categorize it under St. Louis, someone outside St. Louis but looking for studies for Missouri in general may overlook it under St. Louis. (What if the title or abstract contains "St. Louis, Missouri"? Good question. That's why I do a manual read of each abstract, but I really want to find those instances with code soon.)
For readability, I omit any categories that don't match with any studies.
The directories are intended as tools for journalists, advocates, and other researchers to find research local to them, but I hope it'll also be useful beyond that audience.
The currently supported regions reflect the audience of Explaining Crime as I understand it right now; be sure to let me know if you live outside the supported countries and I'll prioritize supporting your location next!
The currently supported countries are Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. “Supported” means not only are mentions of the country used to categorize studies, but also mentions of subcategories such as provinces in Canada and states in the United States and large cities in those subcategories.
I wrote and use simple code to help organize the studies and create these templated directories. Studies are categorized based on a mention of category keywords in their titles, abstracts, or primary author affiliations.
Studies that don't appear to mention any of the terms my code searches for in titles, abstracts, or primary author affiliations appear under the ‘Location not identified’ heading. No doubt some should have been categorized somewhere else. My code-driven collection methods sometimes cannot retrieve abstracts, making it more likely those studies will escape categorization and end up there.
Future editions of these directories will get better as I improve the underlying code and categorization systems.
Suggestions welcome!
Updated end of June 2024: As streamlined as I’ve made the process for these, there’s still enough to do manually (picking a theme, picking studies, copy/pasting into a post, picking an image, etc.) that publishing one each weekday is unmanageable at the moment. I hope to have a stable publishing schedule soon!