Legal Collection

Contents of Tutorial:

1. Uses
2. Topics
3. Coverage and Scope
4. Full Text
5. Publications
6. Basic and Advanced Searching
7. Search Tips
8. Limiters and Expanders
9. Search History/Alerts
10. Visual Searching

Uses

For information on current issues, studies, thoughts, and trends in legal matters.

Topics

The Legal Collection database provides information on law and legal topics such as:

• Criminal Justice
• International Law
• Federal Law
• Organized Crime
• Medical Malpractice
• Labor & Human Resource Law
• Ethics
• Environmental Law

Coverage and Scope

Legal Collection includes scholarly publications such as law journals, along with magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and a few books.

Full Text

There is full text coverage for more than 250 law journals dating as far back as 1965.

Publications

Journals available in the database include American Journal of Criminal Law, California Law Review and National Tax Journal.

To find out what other publications are included in the database:

1. Click on the “Publications” link at the top-left of the screen, in the blue bar.
2. Type in the name of a publication.
3. If the publication is included, the title will be displayed in a results list. The issues of the publication that are included within the database, along with full text availability, is listed below the name of the title. Click on the name of the publication to find out more information, such as the subject areas the publication covers.
4. You can also search for all publications that discuss family law by typing "family law" into the search box, clicking on the radio button below the box that says "By Subject & Description," then clicking "Browse."
5. Click on the "Match Any Words" radio button below the search box to search for any words you want in the title. For example, type "army" into the search box, click "Browse", and the database will show you publications that have the word "army" in the title.
6. You can browse the list of publications if you don't have a specific title in mind.

Basic and Advanced Searching

There is a basic search option and an advanced search option. The only difference between the two options is that in the advanced search there are three “Find” fields in which to enter search terms, instead of one field. Use the additional fields to focus your search. For example, type "king, ryan" into the box and select "AU Author" in the box next to it. Also type "marriage"" into the box below and select "SU Subject Terms" in the next box. This search will find any articles about marriage written by Ryan King.

Search Tips

All of the following search techniques can be used for searching Legal Collection:

Boolean	AND, OR, NOT	To help narrow or broaden your search
Quotations	“Marriage penalty”	To Search for an exact phrase
Parentheses	Marriage AND (bills OR legislation)	For a more focused search: marriage and bills or marriage and legislation
Wildcard	Wom?n	To find multiple letters within a word: woman or women
Truncation	tax*	To search for all forms of a word: tax, taxes, taxation etc…

Limiters and Expanders

To limit the materials searched within the database, you can enter in a publication name such as Michigan Law Review and have the database search for your keywords within that specific publication only. You can also search for articles written during a specific time, for example, from August 2003 to January 2004. You can also limit your search to return only articles with full text access or from scholarly reviewed journals.

There are three ways to expand the number of articles your search retrieves. The "Apply related words" option will search for the synonyms and plural forms of the keywords you typed in the search box, in addition to the keywords you typed in. The "Also search within the full text of the articles" option searches the whole document, abstract, and citation for your keywords instead of just searching for your keywords in the title, author, and subject fields. Selecting the "Find any of my search terms" option also expands your search results by finding articles that mention only one of your terms, and not all of them.

Search History/Alerts

Under the search boxes, users can select the Search History/Alerts tab. This feature allows searchers to save searches, retrieve searches, receive alerts when new articles with their saved search criteria are added to the database, and print their search results. Users can view the results of a saved search by clicking on the “View Results” option under “Actions.”

Visual Search

You may have the Visual Search option available to you through your library. Visual Search is a visual way to find what you are looking for.

For example, click on the "Visual Search" link under the search boxes and type the phrase "dog bite" into the search field. The results show up as a column of multiple subheadings; for example, United States, human-animal relationships, dog attacks, fighting dogs, etc. If you select one (for example, United States), narrower topics for that subheading are provided. The choices get more and more specific until you arrive at an article. The information for this article is listed in green on the right-hand side. Articles are also listed in the green boxes below each column of sub-categories.

For further information on TexShare databases send questions and comments to texshare@tsl.state.tx.us.

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This page was created by Wendy Thompson in Spring 2007.
This page was revised by Iantha Haight in Spring 2009.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin