Getting Started with Research

Interested in reading research and other publications about missing persons but don’t know where to start? Below are some useful links to start with and some tips for finding more.

Official Guidance

Charity and Not-For-Profit Research Reports

The charity Missing People has a page on their website dedicated to their research reports which are available for anyone to read. They include reports about missing adults, missing children, and support for families. You can access those reports here.

Catch-22 has a page of links to their reports here.

NWG also has a page of links to their reports on missing children and young people here.

Academic Handbooks

The following handbooks provide an overview of research on missing persons and are a useful introduction to the topics and researchers involved.

UK Statistics

Each year, the National Crime Agency’s UK Missing Persons Unit publishes statistics on missing incidents in the UK. Their reports and the data they used can be found here.

More Research

For more research and other useful documents, you can see a list of commonly covered topics, see recently added documents, or search for a particular document on our library page.

New research is being published every day, and this website may not have added the latest research yet. If you’d like to do your own search, then Google Scholar is a useful way to do that. Just type in a word/phrase that describes what you’re looking for into the search box and click the blue button or press return.

To search for an exact phrase such as “missing persons”, put quote marks around it when you enter it into the search box, like this: “missing persons”.

You can also search for more than one phrase at the same time like this: “missing persons” AND “runaway”.

When the search results are displayed, you can refine your search further by choosing a date range on the left:

If you want Google to keep searching for new research that matches your search phrase(s), and then send you an email with a link when it finds some, then click on ‘Create an alert’ on the left at the bottom, enter your email address and click “Create Alert”.

A relatively new alternative to Google Scholar is Research Rabbit which is a bit like Spotify but for academic research papers. After finding a research paper that is relevant to what you’re looking for, you can click a button to find all similar research papers or all research by the same authors. Research Rabbit can also send you email alerts when it finds new research that it thinks is relevant to what you’re looking for but these email alerts may be more relevant than alerts that Google Scholar sometimes sends as it uses artificial intelligence. It also displays a visualisation of how all the research links together so that you can see which research papers have been referenced the most and which authors have done research on similar topics:

Another useful way to find out about new research is on social media such as Twitter. Some useful accounts to follow are:

UK:

Elsewhere:

To find more Twitter accounts related to missing persons you can search for the hashtag #MissingPersons.