Legal Collection
Contents of Tutorial:
- Uses
- Topics
- Coverage and Scope
- Publications
- Basic and Advanced Searching
- Search Tips
- Limiters and Expanders
Uses
For information on current issues, studies, thoughts, and trends on legal matters.
Topics
Legal Collection database provides information on law and legal topics such as:
- Criminal justice
- International Law
- Federal Law
- Organized Crime
- Medical
- Labor & Human Resource
- Ethics
- Environment
Coverage and Scope
Legal Collection includes scholarly peer-reviewed publications such as law journals, documents, and case studies.
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:
- Click on the “Publications” link at the top of the screen.
- Type in the name of the publication.
- If the publication is included, the title will be displayed in a results list. To view data such as what issues of the publication are included within the database, just click on the name of the publication.
Basic and Advanced Searching
There is a basic and 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 which can then be narrowed to search a specific field such as title, author, subject etc...which is helpful in focusing your search.
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 replace a single letter: 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 such as August 2003 to January 2004. A search can also be limited to return results from articles with full text access or from scholarly reviewed journals. 
There are three ways to expand the number of articles retrieved. The search for related words option will search for the synonyms and plural forms of the keywords you typed in the search box. The 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, subject etc... fields. Selecting the automatically “And” search terms option also expands your search results. 
Special Features
Search History/Alerts
On the (1) advanced search tab, users can select the (2) “Search History/Alerts tab. This feature allows searchers to (3) save searches, retrieve searches, receive alerts when new articles with their saved search criteria are added to the database and print their search results. (4) Users can view the results of a saved search by clicking on the “View Results” option under “Actions”.
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.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin |
