Finding articles in UK Legal journals

January 2011

Finding articles in hard copy

Interpreting citationsWhat information do you have?

A full citation should have the author, title, year (and volume number if relevant), publication and starting page number

Barber, ‘Laws and Constitutional Conventions’ (2009) 125 LQR 294

You need to know the publication name to find the article. If the publication name is an abbreviation then you can check the Cardiff Index of legal Abbreviations at http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/. You will hopefully have the year and the page number and this should take you straight to the article. If not then you can use the index for the journal which will be different depending on the journal. If you do not have this information either then it may be best to use one of the electronic sources to search.

Finding journals online

E-journals Some e-journals are only in Westlaw (PL,

LQR, Crim LR…), and only back to 1986 But unless you know it’s in Westlaw, try

Oxford e-journals first Find out what the abbreviation stands for

before you get to Oxford e-journals Oxford e-journals only reads full names of

journals, it doesn’t read citations or abbreviations

And try ‘search our online law reports and journals’ and Law Bod 4 Students

1. Type or copy in the name of the journal (not name of article or author, not journal abbreviation!)

2. Searching by Citationmay work, and it may not. It depends on the database and the form of the citation.

3. Link to database appears below the search box, not on a new page. You may need to scroll down the page to get to the link.

Click on the red link for the journal you want.

Using e-journalshttp://ejournals.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

Finding e-journals cont.

The Find it @ Oxford window opens. It may already be open onanother tab in your browser.

4. Check date for which journalis available in each database.

5. Open the database that holds your article by clicking on the database name. Filling in the citation boxes may or may not work – it depends.

6. Once in the database, browse orsearch for the article.

Using Westlaw to find articles

Westlaw has the Legal Journals Index which has abstracts from UK legal journals from 1986

It also has a number of full text journals.

It is worth checking if you only have a partial citation or an incorrect one as it has an advanced search.

Choose journals from the top – don’t search from the front page as it can bring up too

many results

Westlaw home page (access via Oxlip+)

Westlaw journal page: defaults to basic search

Choose advanced search if you are

searching for articles by topic or you want further

options

If you have a specific article and you can use the article title and author field if

you have that information. For the article title you only need to enter

keywords rather than the full title. For the author is it best just to enter the

surname

Subject/keyword is very useful to start your search if searching by subject. There is a list of terms

used to index

The different fields are useful if you are trying to track down a particular

article and you have limited or incorrect information. If

you fill in as much information as you have in

the relevant fields.

Google Scholar Google Scholar

(http://scholar.google.co.uk/)is a free resource which abtracts thousands of articles and books.

It also includes a citation for any article which is cited but it has no abstract for.

It can be good if you have incorrect information or can not find anything elsewhere

It does have limitations – Google does not list what it indexes and so there are gaps

The box looks like a standard Google box and you can type the information

you have straight in. If you want to do a more advanced search, especially if you are doing a subject search then choose ‘advanced scholar search’ on the right

The advanced search gives you options to use the different fields to narrow down your search.

Gives a list of other article that

have cited

If you are on the Oxford Network or the article is free then it gives a link through to the full text

where available. It also give the option to find it at

Oxford which will list where the article is available

Like with a lot of Google services it can bring back a lot of results. You may need to narrow your search down

Please contact us if you have trouble finding an article…..

Law.library@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or 01865 271462