Remember, one of the most useful places you can turn to for research is our own library home page. Here you can access the following vital information for scholarly research.
Remember, as a law student you can access materials in both the law library and the University Libraries (also called Norlin Library). However, by default, searching in the law library catalog will limit you to law library materials. To see all the resources you possibly have at your disposal you should make sure your location is not limited to law library. View this tutorial for searching books in both Law and University Libraries.
Interdisciplinary scholarship is rapidly growing in legal academia. Even with solely legal research other materials are needed to support an argument, whether it be scientific data, statistics, or historical materials.
For these materials the best thing to do is to search University Libraries materials or take advantage of resources outside of the library such as government websites or Google Scholar. The farther outside of the library ecosystem you get, the more materials you will encounter and the more you'll have to sift through. If it ever starts to seem overwhelming, or you find you just can't limit your searching well enough, remember that you can always talk with a librarian who can offer suggestions to improve your initial search ideas.
Watch the video below for basics of searching library materials, including University Library materials.
Most library materials like articles and books will come up when you search the library catalog. However, not all library materials will always come up. Sometimes it makes sense to search within specific databases to find material that might not come up in the catalog (such as, for example, searching within ProQuest Legislative History to find federal legislative history materials, or searching within a law journal database or publication to find a specific article).
Another advantage of searching within specific databases is that you might be able to make use of more advanced search features than what is available in the library catalog. Ask a librarian for help determining databases that might be useful to you and look at the law library's A to Z list of databases, and University Libraries' A to Z list of databases.
As a part of your scholarly research, you should be aware of what has been published on your research topic in other disciplines or interdisciplinary scholarship. You may also be interested in other materials to support their arguments, like scientific data, statistics, or historical materials.
For these materials the best thing to do is to use the general University Libraries page or take advantage of resources outside of the library such as government websites or Google Scholar. The farther outside of the library ecosystem you get, the more materials you will encounter and the more you'll have to sift through. If it ever starts to seem overwhelming, or you find you just can't limit your searching well enough, remember that you can always talk with a librarian who can offer suggestions to improve your initial search ideas.
You can search both law library and university library materials in one place. Because you will be searching so many materials, be sure to take advantage of the advanced search functionality.
Once you run your advanced search, you will be able to filter your search further. Some of the most useful post-search filters are by source type (e.g. books, academic articles, magazines, etc.) and by date. You can also try using the "literature reviews" source type filter to retrieve articles that have extensive discussions of the existing literature on your topic.
