Help! I Have Too Many Results! Tip: Use Secondary Sources
When you run a search and get a zillion cases, you have a lot of options for focusing. This video discusses using secondary sources to get an overview (with citations to cases) before searching for cases directly. (4:54)
Help! I Have Too Many Results! Tip: Use Document Fields (Segments)
Just as your Contacts list has fields for Name and Email Address, legal databases have field names for different parts of their documents. Using these fields (or segments) can make your research much more efficient. This video shows you how. (6:06)
Help! I Have Too Many Results! Tip: Get Search Terms Closer Together
What do you do when your first search turns up too many results? One tactic is to revise your search to require your search terms to appear closer together in a document. This video shows you how. (7:08)
Help! I Have Too Many Results! Narrowing Your Searching to a Smaller Database
Many legal research systems make it easy to search across lots of content--e.g., all the cases from all American jurisdictions. But a search like that can generate way more results than you can deal with. Efficient searchers search in smaller databases. This video shows you how. (8:23)
Books Without "Books": Tips for Source Gathering
How can you gather sources and confirm citations when the libraries are closed? This video shows how you can use ebooks through the library, Google Books and Amazon, and sources on Bloomberg Law, Lexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline. (It was created for the COVID-19 situation, but all these techniques will still be useful when the libraries open up again.)
(16:34)
Retrieving Magazine Articles: Tips for Source Gathering
This video demonstrates how to find magazine and journal articles using the UW Libraries list of e-journals, starting with a known citation.
(10:51)
Retrieving Congressional Reports & Hearings
Researchers often need to find congressional reports or hearings that they see cited in cases and articles. Journal students gathering sources for articles often have to find A LOT of them. This video tells you how to retrieve reports and hearings, focusing on easy techniques. We use Google, congress.gov, govinfo.gov, and HeinOnline.
(13:14)