LibGuides: Law: Finding Legal Research

How to find journal articles

Do you want to find journal articles on a topic or look for a specific article?

Use Discovery - input your topic or the details of a journal article to search across most of the Library's resources

Discovery

If you have a journal title use Journal Finder to check if the Library has access to full text.

Journal Finder

What are journals?

They are: Journals

like magazines but of a scholarly nature
published at regular intervals with no predetermined end
contain articles on a variety of topics
the articles are written by different authors
sometimes they also contain reviews and other information
in printed and electronic formats

Why Should I use them?

journal time is much quicker than for a book
using information from journals will keep you up to date and informed of new developments in your subject
journals articles are more specific than books. They give you more detailed information in a more scholarly and concise format
subject may not yet (or may never) be covered in books
quality research - academic reputation - peer reviewed.

What is scholarly/peer reviewed?

Written by an academic, who is a specialist in the subject
Submitted to an editor, who then passes the work to other professionals or 'peers' for a critiques, the work is then passed back to the original writer for changes to be made before being published
Longer articles, heavily text based
Charts, tables, statistics and images
Properly referenced with a list of references at the end of the article.

Using databases for your subject

Database list

For more specialist searching use an online database

What are online databases?

Databases are specialist search engines that search for quality information, such as journals articles, in specific subject areas.

The databases below are listed in order of relevance for your subject. Hover over the icons to see what help is available.

For help searching the databases contact your Law information team. Details on the Home page

Please note that all databases are provided for educational use only

Lexis Plus (formerly LexisLibrary) This link opens in a new window
Lexis Plus (Lexis+) is a legal database containing UK, EU and international case law, legislation, legal journals, commentary texts, current awareness, and news. The database provides access to full text online legal and news information services and contains a range of practitioner texts including Butterworths Company Law Handbook and Butterworths Family Law Service as well as All England Law Reports, Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents, and Halsbury's Laws. A full-text collection of several UK broadsheet, tabloid and local newspapers is also included.
Westlaw UK This link opens in a new window
This is a database which searches for cases, legislation and journals both for the UK and EU. Searches can be carried out for journal articles using the Legal Journals Index or UK Journals which gives some full text articles.
Hein Online This link opens in a new window
HeinOnline content spans multiple library collections, and subscribers enjoy online access to tens of millions of pages of research material that in many instances is only available in HeinOnline.
British and Irish Legal Information Institute This link opens in a new window
This organisation aims to promote a system of vendor and media neutral citation in the United Kingdom and Ireland
Criminal Justice Abstracts (with full text) This link opens in a new window
Published by Ebsco this resource includes bibliographic records and full text covering essential areas related to criminal justice and criminology. The increasing globalization of criminology is reflected in coverage of hundreds of journals from around the world. There are more than 300,000 records and full text comes from 200 magazines and journals, as well full-text books & monographs.
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers This link opens in a new window
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House of Commons Parliamentary Papers includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688.
Society for Computers and Law This link opens in a new window
SCL - The IT Law Community is the leading UK organisation for legal professionals advising and practising within the IT sector. Keep up to date with the constant changes created by the heady pace of technological change with the unrivalled coverage of IT law issues on the SCL website
UK Statute Law Database This link opens in a new window
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The UK Statute Law Database (SLD) is the official revised edition of the primary legislation of the United Kingdom made available online
ASSIA This link opens in a new window
ASSIA is a bibliographic database which gives references (with abstracts) to the literature of the applied social sciences, including social policy, social services, society, family issues, economics, politics, employment, race relations, health, education and youth work. The abstracts are taken from over 550 English language journals from 16 countries. Coverage is from 1987, with information being updated monthly.
Ingenta This link opens in a new window
Ingenta is a multidisciplinary database which offers access to article summaries from over 28,000 publications. Fulltext access is available to subscribers of particular publications although for a definitive view please follow the Electronic Journals page. Non-subscribers can, for the majority of articles, pay-per-view choosing from electronic, fax or ariel delivery. Please see also Zetoc (Electronic Table of Contents from the British Library) available at http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Easy to use and comprehensive, Scopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature covering 20,500 journals.

Further Help and guidance is available at http://libguides.tees.ac.uk/cinahl/support - please select the Scopus tab

Evaluating your results

Using online databases to find information isn't the end of the story, you also need to be able to judge how relevant your results are. Recent research has found that some students struggle with this.