this is the Australian National University Law Library
This video will show you how to search for and find legal journal articles
While you may have used Google, Google Scholar or even library search tools like SuperSearch to locate
journal articles in other areas of study,
when it comes to Australian legal resources, these tools are not very effective.
The vast majority of scholarly legal resources, including journal articles
are held behind paywalls in a small number of legal databases.
The Law subject guide lists and describes these legal databases.
To select an appropriate database, consider the jurisdiction and topic.
The databases listed in the subject guide include both Australian and multi-jurisdictional databases.
Some other databases focus on a particular area of law.
While you should focus your searching on databases that are relevant to your
area of investigation, you will still need to try a variety of databases.
While there is some overlap, the content is different in each database.
Let's say we have an essay topic looking at climate change litigation.
You've done some background reading and have a basic understanding of the area you are researching
and you have analyzed your topic and brainstormed some key words and phrases that may be relevant.
You are now ready to find some articles.
Let's start with HeinOnline, a large multi-jurisdictional legal database that includes a number of Australian titles.
It is best to start your search with a broader focus to get an idea of
how much information is available on a topic.
You can then progressively refine your search to hone in on specific aspects of a topic.
Let's start our search with the terms climate change litigation.
To narrow our results we can use phrase marks around ‘climate change’
and connect this with our other keyword using AND in all caps.
This tells the database we only want content containing all of the linked keywords, instead of any of them.
However this search has returned well over 16,000 results.
Well, this is far too many to look through. This search has demonstrated
that there are a lot of articles written about climate change litigation.
We now need to start narrowing our search.
This can be done by adding additional keywords to our search strategy.
Let's add AND mining. This has seen a drastic reduction in the number of
results to around 5,000. However, this is still far too many to work through.
We can continue to add additional keywords to refine our search further or we have the option to refine our
search using filters defined by the database.
For example, if we wanted to focus on mining related climate change litigation in Australia
we could select Australia from the location list.
Publication date is also a useful filter especially if you're looking at
recent developments or what was happening at a particular point in time.
To access more information about the article, including an abstract,
click on the title of the article in the results list.
To download a full text PDF version of the article click on the PDF icon.
While HeinOnline is a full text database, you may still come across articles that are not available in full text.
However, you can easily determine if you can access
the full text of these articles within ANU Library's collection
by clicking on the title of the article then clicking on the hyperlinked citation.
If the article is available you will be taken to the database where you can download the full text.
If this doesn't work, you can try searching for the title of the journal
the article was published in on the ANU Library Catalogue and see if the Library holds it in print.
We now need to run our searches again in another database.
This time we will use an Australian database, AGIS.
We will again start with a broader search. As AGIS is an Australian database
it has a much narrower focus than HeinOnline.
The search ‘climate change’ AND litigation
only returns just over 100 results.
If we add AND mining to our search we get just nine articles.
However, the term ‘mining’ may not capture all of the articles that could be relevant to our search,
as the database is only looking for the term ‘mining’.
An article may use the term ‘mine’ or ‘mines’.
Instead of ‘mining’ but these will be excluded from our search.
This is where we can use the truncation search technique to find all the variations of a word.
Adding m-i-n asterisk to our search tells the database to find articles that
include the terms mine, mines, mining or mined,
thus expanding our search.
Another way to expand your search is to include synonyms or alternative terms.
You can do this by using the OR connector.
For example, in our search we can include the term ‘case’ as an alternative term to litigation.
By connecting the two terms with OR.
From our results list we can see an article that discusses a recent landmark judgment in the Rocky Hills case,
which was not previously included in our search results.
However, AGIS does not have many filter options for refining your search.
Click on Advanced Search to filter your search by publication, date, range, or material type.
AGIS is a bibliographic database also known as an index-only database
which means some of the articles will not be full text.
However, clicking on the ‘Find it at ANU’ button will check whether the article is
available on another database subscribed to by the ANU Library.
As with HeinOnline, if there is no electronic version of the
full text available you can search for the title of the
journal the article was published in using the ANU Library Catalogue to see if
it is available in print.
Make sure you evaluate the results you are getting.
Are there references to significant cases or legislation?
Do authors keep referring to the same person as an expert in the area?
Have there been any parliamentary inquiries or committees? Law reform commission reports?
These are all ways you can identify new useful material for your research.
Remember that you can search by more than just keyword.
Search for that expert by author or try searching by subject.
If you are struggling to think of subject terms, look in the databases like AGIS.
They will often let you click on a subject heading like a hashtag.
If you have found some articles look at the reference list of these articles to
find more articles and materials. You can also identify relevant primary materials.
For more adventures in legal research please view our other videos