The University of Alabama School of Law
The University of Alabama School of Law
Bounds Law Library offers helpful resources that can be used during the preemption checking stage when selecting a research topic. If after reviewing the sections of this guide you still have questions about preemption checking, do not hesitate to contact a librarian.
The sections below provide at least one strategy for finding relevant articles on a given topic: beginning with legal indexes of existing journal articles, full-text searching back issues of law journals, and full-text searching non-law articles in other databases.
After reading this guide, if you have additional questions, please contact Lauren Hash.
HeinOnline is the world’s largest English-language database of legal scholarship and includes thousands of law journal titles. Among other resources, HeinOnline provides access to the Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP), a weekly index of recent law review articles arranged by subject or topic. You will find CILP useful for generating new ideas for research topics, avoiding duplicating other scholars’ work, and identifying existing literature on the topic they are researching.
A product of HeinOnline, FILR provides an index of foreign and international legal periodicals arranged in eight parts:
Similar to CILP, the Legal Resource Index provides access to over 700 journals that users can browse by subject, author, case name, and more.
Provides access to an index of numerous legal periodicals published between 1908 and 1981 in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as annual surveys of jurisdictional laws and federal courts, annual institutes, and annual reviews of work on specific topics.
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a searchable database of around 12,000 open access journals, including law journals.
HeinOnline provides access to full-text searching of all materials in the Law Journal Library, a database of thousands of American and foreign legal periodicals.
Westlaw provides access to full-text searching of their collection of legal periodicals, including many American law reviews.
Lexis provides access to full-text searching of their collection of legal periodicals, including many American law reviews.
Scholarly Commons provides access to abstract searching of legal/scholarly articles written by faculty at hundreds of American law schools.
SSRN provides access to legal scholars' draft articles, working papers, and forthcoming scholarship in a range of subject areas. Users can full-text search the database's content to find articles and notes that have recently been published or will soon be published. It is useful for finding articles that have not yet appeared on HeinOnline, Westlaw, Lexis, or which are subject to embargo.
Academic Search Premier provides access to full-text versions of scholarly articles. It contains indexing and abstracts for news sources and refereed journals in nearly every area of academic study, including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language & linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, ethnic studies, and more.
Business Source Complete indexes business journals throughout the world on various subjects, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance, economics, and more. It also contains financial data, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses. Lastly, it provides access to full-text articles from many publishers and links out to full-text options for other articles.
JSTOR provides access to full-text PDF versions of many scholarly titles in a range of subject areas, including literature, biological sciences, economics, finance, and statistics.
Bounds Law Library provides a list of available databases that can be used to search for topics in specialized areas.
Gorgas Library also provides a list of databases to available databases that can be used to search for topics in specialized areas.
Google Scholar provides access to PDF versions of some scholarly literature in many academic areas.
You may find it helpful to set up database alerts notifying ypu of new scholarship in the topics/subject areas you are researching.
Click this link for instructions to create many different types of alerts in Westlaw.
Click this link for instructions to create many different types of alerts in Lexis.
Click this link for instructions to create an alert using Google Alerts.
Academic Legal Writing
by
Scholarly Writing for Law Students
by