Searching for journal articles: Indexes or full text? Westlaw Legal Journals Index

Advantages of journal indexes Papers indexed by experts Papers can be searched by subject, case and/or legislation cited as well as title, author, journal etc Abstracts provided (in LJI but not in ILP) Includes all papers for given source: – Eg Westlaw Legal Journals Index (LJI) indexes all UK/Europe journals since 1986 – Eg Wilson Web Index to Legal Periodicals (ILP) indexes years of Anglo-American legal docs including books, journals…

Disadvantages of legal indexes Two-step process: – Search index collecting citations – Find full text articles Limited to particular jurisdictions or topics Index with no abstracts doesn’t tell you much Abstracts may not reflect article content Did they really index everything?

Different strategies for indexes & fulltext Indexes: – Pay attention to indexing terms being used – Use thesauri or lists of terms to find correct terms – Be aware of time period and content covered – Boolean searching less important (only searching title, abstract, keywords) Full text searching: – Be aware of time period and content covered – Use search language required (see ‘help’ or ‘tips’); search language varies from source to another

In Westlaw, choose Journals on top menu bar, then click on Legal Journals Index

Indexing terms from ‘List of Terms’ in Westlaw’s Legal Journal Index

Start with simple search and refine (efficiency thru laziness), Q – I’m looking at alternative dispute resolution… Key alternative dispute resolution into subject/keyword

1218 returns is too many to look at. I want to know about ADR and Family law specifically. Key family into search within results.

Before clicking on (yellow) link to read abstract, check journal name, article length and other keywords to inform yourself about likelihood of article being relevant, explanatory, case comment…

Use Result arrow to navigate quickly through abstracts… Beware: NOT a link to the full text Hooray! A link to the full text

Tick the results you want to read, and print or list, then on to Oxford e-journals and OLIS

ticked list to yourself for future reference ‘full-text ‘documents will only be the abstract if no full text in Westlaw Add correct and useful info to ‘To’, ‘Subject’ and ‘Message’ fields Make sure correct Radio button is ticked