Legal Research Center | Legal Periodical Research

Earle Mack School of Law Legal Research Center

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Research Guides > Legal Periodical Research

Legal Periodical Research

Databases and Coverage
Starting Your Search
Finding Full Text
How to Use:

Topical Research:
Index to Legal Periodicals, LegalTrac, and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals

Index to Legal Periodicals (ILP) and LegalTrac are the best resources to use for legal periodical research. Though there is much overlap in the journals they index, each has a good deal of unique coverage, so for the most thorough research, you should use both. Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) covers foreign (non-Anglo-American) periodicals, and is better-suited for that type of research.

Databases and Coverage

Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text
(1982 - present)
Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective
(1908 - 1982)
Law reviews & journals indexed: over 1,025
Unique coverage: ILP also indexes over 1,400 books and treatises a year, as well as yearbooks, institutes, bar association publications, symposia, and more.

LegalTrac
(1980 - present)
Law reviews & journals indexed: over 1,400
Unique coverage: LegalTrac also indexes Law-related articles from more than
1,000 additional business and general-interest periodicals. In addition, they index legal newspapers, bar association journals, and international legal publications from English-speaking countries.

Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
(1985 - present)
Law reviews & journals indexed: over 540
Unique coverage: IFLP indexes foreign (non-Anglo-American) legal literature worldwide, including comparative law and legal systems, such as Islamic law; socialist law; public and private international law; and transnational commercial law. The types of documents indexed include journals, congress reports, essay collections, yearbooks, and book reviews.

Starting Your Search – General Tips

Regardless of which database you use for research, your search strategy will be similar: start broadly, then focus your search.

Begin with a Keyword search on your topic. This is usually the default method of any search engine.
Look through your results for any hits that seem relevant. Open up the results and look for Subjects or Descriptors. This is the controlled vocabulary that indexes use to group articles together by subject (for example, a search in ILP for “domestic abuse” brings up the subject heading “domestic violence”).
Click on the subject headings to bring up more results in that subject. Here you will find the most relevant results. Since these are classified by indexers, you won’t have all of the “bad hits” you would get with a regular Keyword search, and you will likely find additional articles you wouldn’t have found through Keyword search.
You can continue to search using this method until you have found as many subject headings as you need for your topic.
Once you have your subjects selected, open up an Advanced Search screen (almost every database has one). Here you can enter multiple subjects and refine your results through other limiters, such as date or document type.
Note that most databases will allow you to do this type of limiting from a list of results, rather than constructing a whole new search.

Finding Full-Text

ILP Full Text and LegalTrac have full-text available for some of the journals they index (ILP Retro does not). However, the majority of the time you will need to use the citation to find full-text from another source.

To do this, look for the SFX icon in your results. SFX will link back to the LRC's catalog to check if we have the journal available from another provider, such as HeinOnline.

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Click the button to open the database with the full-text article. Depending on the database, you may be taken directly to the article, or you may have to browse the journal to locate it.

Using Index to Legal Periodicals (ILP) Full Text / Retro

Index to Legal Periodicals (ILP) can be found on the Quick Links section of the law library main page. ILP and ILP Retro can be found on our Databases page.
To search both ILP Full Text and Retro at once, expand the Open Database Selection Area after logging in.

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Check off Legal Periodicals Full Text and Retro, and continue your search.
Rather than Keyword, ILP defaults to “All – Smart Search”. You can use this for your initial searches.
NOTE: in most scholarly research, you would want to limit your results to “Peer-Reviewed” journals. However, this does not include all law reviews, so for legal research, don’t limit your results in this way.
Once you’ve pulled up a list of results, take note of the “Context Discovery Keys” on the left. This will suggest related subjects, as well as allowing you to limit your search by Document Type, Publication Year, etc.

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Your results list will display an icon if HTML or PDF full-text is available. Otherwise, click on the button to find the full-text through the Legal Research Center.

Using LegalTrac

LegalTrac can be found on the Quick Links section of the Legal Research Center main page, as well as our Databases page.
LegalTrac defaults to Keyword search, which you should use for your initial searches.
NOTE: in most scholarly research, you would want to limit your results to “Peer-Reviewed” journals. However, this does not include all law reviews, so for legal research, don’t limit your results in this way.
Once you’ve pulled up a list of search results, you can use the Search box on the left to narrow your results by Document Type, Publication, or Subject

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NOTE: LegalTrac will only display an button in the results list for results it does not have available in full-text. If you don’t see the SFX button, click on their full-text icon -
Clicking on a record will open it up and allow you to view related subjects in the left column, which you can use to refine your search.

Using Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP)

Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) can be found on our Databases page.
IFLP defaults to Keyword search, which you should use for your initial searches. To do a more thorough search, click on the Advanced tab
Unfortunately, the search results list in IFLP does not include links. To get to the links, click on “Complete Record” to open a record, then choose the link at the bottom of the screen.
IFLP indexes descriptors (subjects), but does not hyperlink them, so you will have to copy-and-paste them into an Advanced search.
Authors in IFLP are only indexed by last name and first initial(s). Note this when searching on common names.

Author:
Keith Berthrong
Electronic Services Librarian
kab66@drexel.edu