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SSRN

How to use SSRN for research; tips for using SSRN to share papers.

Quick Search

SSRN's quick search looks for words in the author, title, or abstract of a paper. This search is available throughout SSRN.

screen snip of search box

Search box on SSRN's homepage

Search box on the top of most SSRN pages.

If you want to search for a phrase, use quotation marks: "equal protection".

 

Sample searches:

  • "right of publicity"
  • "first amendment" "citizens united"
  • calo robot
  • lombardi egypt
  • sanford "affordable care"

Advanced Search

In Advanced Search, you can:

  • narrow your search by requiring words to be in the title
  • broaden your search by searching full text
  • focus your search by looking for author's name only in author field (e.g., if you want papers written by someone named Miranda but not every abstract that mentions Miranda v. Arizona)
  • limit your results to recent papers (e.g., from the last week, last year, or last three years)

screen snip SSRN Advanced Search box

Use the Date menu to limit your search to papers posted within a recent period (from the last week to the last three years). (Note that papers that were written many years ago might have been posted recently.)

In Advanced Search, you can also limit your search to one or more SSRN Networks.

For example, searching only the Legal Scholarship Network for "cost benefit" gets only about half as many papers as searching all the networks, including those for economics, management, and political science.

Sometimes you'll want the cross-discipline breadth you get by searching all the networks. Other times, you will like the ability to choose networks..

screen snip for limiting by network

 

Search Engines

Major search engines (including Google and Bing) include SSRN abstracts. If you want to restrict a Google or Bing search to SSRN, add the domain to the search, like  this:

"privileges and immunities" site:ssrn.com