Capstone Research

Research Tips

  • Start with a secondary source
  • Is there a key statute or regulation? You can consult an annotated code.
  • Is there a key case? Note the cases cited then Shepardize or KeyCite.
    • Don’t forget to consult “Other Sources”
    • Narrow by keywords and dates
  • You may need to go a little outside Law Reviews (Sociology, Criminal Justice, Policy literature)
  • If you do end up going to a library shelf, browsing the nearby books often produces unexpected results.

While many databases support natural language searching, you may be able to generate more precise results using a Boolean search. For an introduction to Boolean searching, watch this Lightning Lesson. 

The basic Boolean operators are: 

AND - tells the database to search for two or more terms within the same document. e.g. cat AND dog. This creates a narrower search. 

OR - tells the database to find one or the other of two or more terms within the same document. e.g. cat OR dog. This creates a broader search.

 

NOT - tells the database to exclude a term from the search. e.g. cat NOT tiger. 

 

Additional terms and connectors include: 

Within N words of

/N
Search within a certain number of words. e.g. age /5 discrimination

 

Within the same sentence

/s
Search for words within the same sentence. e.g. market /s negligence

Within the same paragraph

/p
Search for words within the same paragraph. e.g. defamation /p anti-SLAPP

At least N times

atleastN

 Finds results that occur at least a certain number of times within the document. e.g. dog atleast10

Parentheses

( ) 
Determines the order of operations for the search. e.g. (dog /5 bite) /p child

Quotation marks

" "

 Search for the exact phrase. e.g. "summary judgment"

Truncation search

!

 Search for the stem of a word to yield variations on that word. e.g. defam! yields defamation, defame, defames, defamatory etc.

Wild card

*
Search for variant spellings of a word. e.g. wom*n yields woman, women, womyn etc. 

 

Certain databases have a thesaurus that you can search to identify particular search terms. When using the thesaurus function, you can build a search by adding terms. 

Below is a walkthrough of the thesaurus in EBSCO's ERIC database. 

From the database's homepage, the thesaurus is located on the top bar. 

You can use the thesaurus search bar to locate terms that are used in the database. Let's run a search for "law student".

While my search for "law student" did not return any results, the thesaurus suggests the term "law students".

Under the term "law students" the thesaurus includes the broader term "graduate students", along with related terms like "law schools" and "lawyers". From here, I can click on the box next to "law students" and add it to my search. 

While it is generally preferable to cite to more recent sources, don't discount older resources! Older resources can point you to more recent sources by checking what cited an older resource. 

Google Scholar is a great way to check for citations to resources. (Web of Science, HeinOnline, and other databases have a similar function.)

This article is from 2000, and there are 115 articles that have cited it. If we click on "Cited by", we can find more recent scholarship that cited this article. 

We can further refine the sources by limiting the search to a particular range of years.