Finding secondary sources on the web
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Contents
Introduction
- Free access resources
- Subscription services
- Current awareness services and digests
- Unlike legislation and case law (where AustLII is
a relatively comprehensive first port of call for Australian
law), no single website (other than subscription-based
bibliographic databases - as to which see below) provides a fully
reliable ready reference point for locating secondary sources such as
texts, journal articles etc. Moreover, although the range of law
journals publishing on the Web is rapidly increasing, it remains the
case that only a small proportion of law journals is published on the
Web in full text. This may be sufficient if you are writing a
minor law school essay/assignment or an advice for a client where all
you need is a single reasonably up-to-date article on topic, but is
quite unsuitable for legal writing where a comprehensive
coverage of relevant secondary sources is expected e.g. writing a law
journal article, Honours paper or post-graduate research.
- Nevertheless, finding a freely available,
relevant and reasonably current journal article on the Web is a useful
starting point for any form of legal research. Apart from
anything else, the footnotes of such an article will probably point
you towards a range of other relevant sources.
- In addition to law journals published in full
text on the Web, there are several Web databases which allow you to
locate relevant articles in the much larger range of purely 'hard
copy' journals. Obviously, you will then need to go to your
local law library to obtain a copy, although at least one of these
databases, Carl Uncover Web,
is also a document delivery service and can (for a fee) fax or email a
wide range of journal articles to you.
- AustLII is still the best place to start. Its World
Law facility is the single most impressive database for
finding legal resources on the Web.
- World
Law allows you to locate resources using either its search
facility or subject directory (catalog) structure. I
recommend that you use both for any serious search.
- The World
Law search facility has indexed the full text of millions
of law-related web pages throughout the world (including law
journals). It uses the powerful (and familiar to lawyers and
law students) SINO search engine, and frequently returns relevant
'hits' when general search engines (or even other legal search
engines like FindLaw Webcrawler) do not.
- However, be aware of World
Law's limitations:
- It cannot index PDF and some other file
formats. An increasing range of law journals (e.g. Sydney Law
Review) is being published in PDF.
- It appears to re-index law journals
relatively infrequently (probably because of the vast scope of
its overall coverage), so that you might miss relevant recent
journal articles if you only use the search facility. For example, I performed a search for a recent article called
'Rationality and Judicial Review of Administrative Action' by
Geoff Airo-Farulla. It is in Volume 24 of Melbourne University Law Review
(2000) and is available on the Web ( in fact on AustLII itself). Nevertheless, at the time of writing it was not
possible to retrieve it using the World
Law search facility. Rather more surprisingly,
even the ordinary AustLII search facility did not return this
article!! Apparently, AustLII simply had not got around
to re-indexing the MULR at the time of writing this
page. Thus, the only way you can find this article via World Law at present (April 2001) is to browse to the MULR pages
using the catalog (directory) structure (to Australian Law
Journals; then MULR; then browse each of the available
editions).
- Similarly, neither World
Law nor an ordinary AustLII search returned a hit for
a recent article by Sir Anthony Mason called 'Judicial Review:
a View from Constitutional and Other Perspectives' in Volume
28 of Federal Law Review (2000). Like the Airo-Farulla
article mentioned above, it also contains some observations on
judicial review concerning facts found by irrational reasoning. By way of comparison, I conducted the same search using the Google search engine <rationality and "judicial
review">. It found the Mason article but not the
Airo-Farulla one. The clear lesson is that if you
want to maximise your chances of finding all relevant material
available on the Web you need to perform the same search (or a
similar one having regard to the engine's supported Boolean
operators) using a variety of search engines. You should
also browse
relevant directories/catalogs.
- The World
Law search facility also often seems to be much slower than the ordinary AustLII legislation and case
law search facilities.
Thus you may need to be patient when waiting for it to return
'hits' from a search.
- However, World Law also has many
strengths:
- It has a much more genuinely
international focus than any other legal directory/search
facility (most of which are heavily skewed towards US
sources).
- You can easily perform a search for law
journals of a particular country by navigating to the main
catalog page for that country; going to its law journals page
and then performing your search. The default setting of
the search facility searches only the resources linked from
the page you are on: e.g. if you go to the Australian law
journals page and use the search facility you will
automatically be searching only Australian law journals.
This is extremely useful in filtering out irrelevant 'hits',
but can also be dangerous. Sometimes Australian
academics publish articles (or conference papers) in overseas
journals or websites.
- It has an excellent online User Guide & Guided Tour to assist you in using it effectively.
- There are
many other legal subject
directories which are also worth browsing (and may
sometimes list material not yet indexed by AustLII World
Law). It is not practical to review
these directories here, but you would be well advised to familiarise
yourself with some of them (especially FindLaw and CataLaw).
- Australian
Public Law Journal
Articles links is a very useful way of finding journal
articles in the public law field. I maintain very up to date categorised listings
of (and links to) Australian law journal articles in the field of
public law (including articles in PDF format). But again keep in
mind the limitations of this service:
- It is a manual index maintained essentially
by only one person, so it might not be completely current if I am
very busy on other tasks;
- It only covers public law topics;
- It does not contain a full text search
facility;
- Nor does it currently contain searchable
abstracts, so that you will usually need to guess the subject
matter of the article from its title.
- Ingenta
(incorporating Carl UnCover Web) is a US-based database of current article information taken from well over 18,000 multidisciplinary
journals (including lots of law journals). UnCover contains brief descriptive information for over 8,800,000 articles which have appeared since
1988. This is almost certainly the single largest and most
reliable free access database for locating relevant law journal
articles. AND SEARCHING INGENTA AND UNCOVER WEB IS FREE!! Note that Uncover's main function is document delivery i.e. you can
purchase a wide range of indexed journal articles (although not
many of the Australian ones at present) for fax or desktop delivery
(in PDF or
HTML format). Costs vary, but average around $A20 at
time of writing this page. Thus, wherever possible you should use UnCover as a
locator, and then obtain the article itself from your university's law
library - otherwise it could get very
expensive. However, Uncover may provide a time and
cost-effective means of obtaining articles in journals not held by
your law school library. Check with your law librarian whether
the cost can be charged against your Faculty's inter-library loan
budget.
- Social
Science Research Network (SSRN) is another US database
which also appears to index a large range of articles and abstracts. It even has a Legal Scholarship Network. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- SSRN seems to be a quite new service, so you
are not likely to be able to find older journal articles.
- the website claims its main function is to
index new articles, sometimes even in advance of
publication. Thus you would probably be best advised to use
it only for that purpose, and use UnCover
Web and AustLII World
Law as your primary tools for locating journal articles.
- Introduction
- With the arguable exception of UnCover
Web,
the only large-scale, reasonably comprehensive databases which
enable you reliably to find secondary sources not available in
full text on the Web are all subscription-based. The most
important of these commercial bibliographic databases are AGIS,
APAIS,
Wilson's Index to Legal Periodicals ('WILP') and LegalTrac (InfoTrac
Web).
- Fortunately, most law school libraries (and
general law libraries) subscribe to at least some of the above,
and you should be able to obtain the necessary access password if
you are an enrolled student. If you are a law student at
Northern Territory University follow the these steps (NB if you
are a currently enrolled NTU student you can also obtain NTU
passwords by gong to the teaching
pages - but you will need a password to do so!):
- Click
here to check to which databases NTU subscribes.
- Click
here to obtain the relevant password. The Library
advises that passwords should usually be provided within 24
hours of request.
- Click
here to read NTU Library's hints on searching for
journal articles using bibliographic databases.
- Click
here to view the NTU catalog to check whether NTU
Library holds the journal containing the article you want
(note it is a WebPAC and may take a minute or so to load and
initialise - you might want to open a separate browser window for
the catalog so you can go on with other things and not have to
wait each time you want to open the library catalog).
- If NTU Library does not hold the journal
you want you have a couple of choices:
- order it by inter-library loan (this
will need lecturer authorisation because it costs the
Faculty money)
- order it using UnCover
Web (this will also need lecturer authorisation if you want
NTU to pay for it - and you would need to explain the
urgency).
- Although all the databases employ the
familiar Boolean keyword searching, each has its own
idiosyncracies, indexing methods and uses search operators
slightly differently. To
carry out legal research effectively, you need to be very familiar
with AGIS and either WILP or LegalTrack (see below). A good start is the NTU
Library hints. In addition, I strongly recommend
that you read relevant sections of Nemes, I. and Coss, G., Effective
Legal Research, (2nd ed) Butterworths (2001). It is an
excellent work, explaining to the reader how to use databases in very
clear language. It also makes extensive use of 'screen dump'
illustrations which make it very easy to understand even for the
novice researcher.
- Finally, as with the free access options
discussed above, there is no assurance that any single database
will contain all the references relevant to your topic. To ensure comprehensiveness you should search 2 or 3
databases.
- Attorney General's Information Service
(AGIS) (access via
INFORMIT) - Definitely the leading source
for Australian and Asia-Pacific law journals. Produced by the AGIS
Section of the Lionel Murphy Library, Attorney-General's Department,
Canberra, AGIS is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles from
published material on all aspects of law. Source documents include over 120 Australian, New Zealand and Asia Pacific
law journals, and selected articles from major law journals from the United
States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Subject coverage includes all aspects of law including administrative law,
banking, companies and securities, constitutional law, copyright law, criminal
law, environmental law, family law, human rights, international law, legal aid,
and trade practices.
- Australian Criminology
Database (CINCH) (access via
INFORMIT) - Australian Criminology Database (CINCH), produced by the JV Barry Library,
Australian Institute of Criminology, is a bibliographic database that indexes
and abstracts articles from published and unpublished material on all aspects
of crime and criminal justice. Source documents include journal articles, monographs, monograph chapters,
conference papers, government documents, book reviews and theses. Statistical publications in serial form such as annual statistical reviews are
gradually being added to the database. Subject coverage includes all aspects of crime and criminal justice including
corrections, crime, crime prevention, criminal law, criminology, juvenile justice,
law enforcement, police and victims of crime.
- Australian Federal Police Digest
(AFPD) (access via
INFORMIT) - produced by the Australian Federal
Police Library, Canberra, is a bibliographic database that indexes and
abstracts articles from published and unpublished material on policing,
criminology, law enforcement and related fields. Source documents include selected Australian and overseas journals,
conference papers and chapters of some books. Subject coverage includes policing, criminology, law enforcement, law,
management, occupational health and safety, and social sciences.
- Australian Public Affairs Information Service
(APAIS) (access via
INFORMIT) - is an indexing and full text
database that provides Internet access to the scanned images of journal
articles from published material on the social sciences and humanities
(including a significant number of law journals).
- Wilson's
Index to Legal Periodicals (WILP) (access via OCLC First
Search) - produced by The H.W. Wilson Company,
WILP is a bibliographic database that indexes legal journals, yearbooks, institutes, bar association organs,
law reviews, and government publications originating in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand
(and also cites book reviews). It covers all areas of law,
including corporate law; real estate and tax law; criminal law; recent court decisions; new legislation.
- LegalTrack (InfoTrack Web) - WILP's main US competitor. Numerous
Australian law school libraries subscribe to it (although not NTU). Its US and international coverage is said to be as wide as and in some
cases superior to WILP, and it is also said to be a little easier to
use. No web link is available here: you can only log onto this
service via your university law library website (if it subscribes).
- Although not strictly designed as bibliographic
databases, the 2 major current awareness services (Butterworths
Australian Current Law and LBC's Australian Digest and Australian Legal Monthly
Digest) both index considerable numbers of journal articles and other
secondary sources. NTU subscribes to the LBC products.
- The Australian Digest – Online is the only service of its kind in Australia that
covers reported Australian case law from the beginning of law reporting in
Australia (1825) to the present: it also provides information about words and
phrases and legislation judicially considered in each case, as well as
references to related journal articles. It has comprehensive searching on any
authority for a particular point of law via an extensive online collection of
reported cases.
- Australian Legal Monthly Digest Online - Research the latest developments in case law and legislation from all over
Australia. LBC’s Australian Legal Monthly Digest allows you to streamline
your legal research, providing a thorough overview of the latest significant legal
developments. Search forms allow you to find the latest cases, legislation, articles and more.
The service includes separate search forms specifically designed to assist you
in searching for cases, legislation, journal articles, books, and other
information.
