Researching the law - How to find articles in legal journals
If you have an article you want to get a copy of...
the reference you have been given should have:
- An author or authors
- A title
- A reference
The reference is normally essential to give you the date, possibly a volume number, a journal title and a page number. It will be difficult, but not impossible to find the article if one of the above elements is incomplete.
Presuming you have a complete reference, decide whether you want a printed version or want to look online.
For a printed version look up the journal title in the catalogue (use the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations if necessary as the catalogue does not work with abbreviations). Read the location information carefully. Sometimes you will find that a copy of the article you are looking for has been placed in the Core Text Collection.
For an online version look up the journal title from the Online Journals link on the Templeman Library Online Resources page. Follow the on screen instructions to go to the full text of the journal.
If the reference is incomplete...
use one of the indexing and abstract services and search by the elements that you do have eg. title and/or author to locate the full journal reference.
If you use any of the services from the indexing and abstracting services pages, on locating the correct reference you will be offered the article linker icon. Click on the icon and follow the instructions to get the full text of the article.
You could also use the journals and indexing services of LNB or Westlaw to locate the article reference, but they work independently of article linker software.
If you are looking for journal articles on a particular subject...
there are a number of very good indexing and abstracting services which are designed to make searching by topic simple. Those that are particularly recommended can also be accessed from the Electronic Law Library. Every abstract entry will have subject indexing. Once you have identified the subjects under which relevant articles are indexed you can use the terms to do another search to find all relevant articles in that service.
TIP Use the help facilities in each service to find out how they work.
The following services all have relevant indexing and abstracting services :
| Article linker? | Controlled vocabulary for searching? | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| IBSS | Yes | Bibliographical information from an international selection of publications (including over 2,600 journals) in the field of economics, political science, sociology and anthropology | Index |
| Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals | Yes | Access to legal literature worldwide including all forms of non Anglo-American law. | Index |
| Index to Legal Periodicals | Yes | Bibliographic data for articles from legal periodicals and law books | Thesaurus |
| Index to Articles Related to Law | No | Includes details of substantial English language articles published throughout the world that are of research value. Reproduction of a printed index. | |
| Journals Index on LNB | No | Covers c.120 journals from legal and business publishers | Topics |
| Legal Journals Index on Westlaw | No | Covers legal journals published in the UK and Europe and journals covering topics related to the laws of the European Community and its member states | List of terms |
| Social Sciences Citation Index in ISI Web of Knowledge | Yes | Useful for finding articles that have cited a relevant article - ie extending potential bibliography |
TIP Having found a useful source for articles on a topic, why not see if the dataset has an alerting service that will repeat your saved search at regular intervals. See setting up an alerting service.