With the recent increase in working from home, or difficulties getting to the Great Library to use our print material, HeinOnline is a great resource for Canadian Federal and Provincial historical legislation.
Sometimes an article can be very tricky to track down. It might be from an obscure journal, or maybe from something old enough that no one carries it any more. That may require tracking down a print version hidden away in some library’s archives, but sometimes some creative searching online can provide surprising results.
Limit where you look
Sometimes too much is just as bad as not enough. If you find yourself searching for an article title on a web search engine you may get hundreds or thousands of results. Most of us will scan the first page, and maybe the second, but are quick to give up after that.
A lot of the time, articles will be published as a PDF, so limit your search to that file format by either using the advanced search function
Or use the limiter “filetype” in the search field.
Change where you are looking
Most articles are often published as part of a journal. That means you might limit your search to libraries or sites that have access to that publication. If you separate the article from the journal, you can look in unusual places that have already uploaded or published that article separate from its original publication.
When you browse the search results, try looking at academic websites. Again, you can use the advanced search, or use the limiter “site:” and limit to academic domains such as “.edu.” Sometimes universities publish their syllabi online and will link to any reading or documents for a course. Often they link to paywall sources, but it’s worth a look because when there is no online resource the organization may upload the document itself, or provide alternative sites.
Let someone do the looking for you
Those alternative sites may lead you to sites that may have already compiled or collected documents and journals you are looking for. If I haven’t found the specific article I am looking for, I may try to search by journal issue or volume. Article titles aren’t always indexed so once you’ve narrowed your search, you can widen it again when you’ve found a resource that is more specific to your interest.
There are a few popular sites like SSRN, but I am always stumbling upon other sites that provide other avenues of searching. These can often be open-access, but they may also have a soft paywall that requires signing up, or using a free trial.
Look out
The internet is an amazing resource but just like every other tool, it can be used to harm as well. A lot of sites use your google search to create a link that may look like exactly what you are looking for but may contain a virus or spam. Be careful what you are downloading. Watch for unusual file types such as .exe or suspicious looking sites.
As an information professional I am an advocate for open information, but I am always mindful of copyright restrictions. Fair use allows some leeway when sharing articles and texts, but it may not always be clear where that leeway ends.
Some sites such as Sci-Hub might be a bit of a grey area, and I tend to err on the side of caution, so use reputable sites as much as you can.
Bonus tip
One piece of advice I haven’t used much but is worth a shot is contacting the author directly. Some authors will provide their articles for free upon request. So if they are a contemporary author, try giving them a search on LinkedIn or at their organization.
Of course sometimes no matter how hard you look, you just can’t find what you are looking for. Sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes. Even if you try thinking outside the box, everyone has their own way of looking at things. So ask someone else to give it a gander, they may be able to see things from a different perspective. They can be colleagues, or professional listservs, or even your friendly library.
Interested in what were the most viewed decisions of the past year? Take a look at the most searched for, and most accessed, cases on CanLII with their Top Ten Accessed Cases on CanLII from 2020.
More Manitoba content has been added to CanLII with the Manitoba Annual Statutes. Statutes from 1988 to present are now part of the CanLII database which means you can now use these with CanLII’s features such as creating alerts, finding citing cases, and saving documents to Lexbox, Lexum’s “Online legal research workspace”.
Manitoba content on CanLII now includes decisions from Manitoba Reports, Manitoba Reports (2nd) series and the Revised Manitoba Statutes from 1987.
This online resource is a great stop for periodicals, statutes, and reporting series. Navigating the large content it offers can be tricky however. The HeinOnline Blog offers a few tips every month to help find what you are looking for, as well as keeping you updated with new features and content. Here are a few highlights from the last month.
Tip of the Week: How to Use ScholarCheck – Learn how analyze the most-cited journals, papers, and authors. Use this feature to find the most cited and accessed document.
New Case Citation Alert for Authors! – Stay up to date with alerts whenever your favorite author has new content, has their works cited, or even similar content to their work has been added.
2020 may have been an annus horribilis, to quote the Queen and many others, but for this blog, it was award worthy. We won a #Clawbie for Best Law Library resources! (It was really just an honour to be nominated …)
Check out all the other award winners – there are many new resources just waiting to be discovered!
Stephen Thiele, a research partner at Gardiner Roberts, recently published the following on the difficulties of searching online when you are looking for judicial consideration of “and” and “or”. As these are also boolean operators, it can be difficult for platforms to distinguish between the two. Here is Stephen’s advice.
I have been a legal research lawyer for almost 30 years.
When I started law school in 1987 the use of laptops to take notes in lectures was completely unknown. Our first year legal research and writing class was based on how to conduct research using books like case reports, The Canadian Abridgment Digests, and the Canadian Encyclopedic Digests (Ontario) and other paper sources. Online research was limited to “Quicklaw”, which was a database of cases that could be searched using Boolean search parameters. These cases were generally considered to be unreported decisions because they had not been published in case reports, such as the Dominion Law Reports or the Ontario Reports.
When I articled, we did not have a desk top computer and all legal research was done using the physical books that were either in the firm’s small library or at the nearby law school law library.
When I was called to the Ontario Bar in 1992, lawyers were only beginning to get desktop computers installed in their offices. Thus, online commercial legal research sources were still in their infancy as the legal publishers were still developing platforms that could be utilized over the internet and easily accessed from a law office computer.
At the time, the Canadian Abridgment Digests became one of the first product that was made available on a CD-Rom and eventually Carswell was able to develop an online research tool to rival Quicklaw.
The race toward the virtual library had begun.
Today, law students and the legal profession have become dependent on using online tools to conduct legal research. Paper products have disappeared from library bookshelves as lawyers and students access virtual law libraries. However, as I recently discovered, conducting online legal research is not necessarily easy if the point of law being searched is a common word.
The words “and” and “or” are words that have received a lot of judicial consideration. But they are so common that trying to find jurisprudence in which they have been judicially interpreted using online search tools can prove difficult.
For example, there are some tools available online that are specifically created to assist the researcher in understanding how certain words have been judicially considered. For example, the product “Words & Phrases” might be a good place to discover how the words “and” and “or” have been interpreted. However since both “and” and “or” are Boolean search connectors, they are “stop words” when entered electronically in the relevant search fields of this tool. Accordingly, no results can be obtained.
Meanwhile online dictionaries are not necessarily adequate either, as I discovered when searching a dictionary on another online private commercial source even though these two very common words have received much attention.
So in order to track down the relevant law in which the meaning of common words is sought using virtual research tools, a legal researcher must think of other words and search strategies to produce the desired results.
But finding an alternative might still prove to be elusive. For example, a researcher might try to use different natural language searches or different Boolean search strings such as: “contractual /s interpretation /s “and”” or “meaning /s “and” /s “or””. However, these search strings produce unsatisfactory results.
Thus, a legal researcher might currently still be tempted to hop in a car, while we work from home during the COVID pandemic and potentially in the future, and drive to the office to access a hard copy of a law dictionary to discover the legal meaning of the word “and” and “or”, especially where there is time pressure to find an answer.
But this is an easy way out and is likely to be unavailable in the future as law firms feel the pressure to convert their physical law libraries to virtual law libraries that are accessible to all lawyers and law students from their computers at all times of the day.
Accordingly, in an evolving world where technology is replacing paper, it is incumbent for legal researchers to evolve their methodologies to match the evolution that is taking place in the legal publishing world.
For online research where the only source available might be a case law database because helpful textbooks have not yet been converted to an electronic format or might not be included in a firm’s subscription, the meaning of common words like “and” and “or” requires the researcher to utilize uncommon words. For the words “and” and “or” those uncommon words are “conjunction”, “conjunctive” and “disjunctive”.
As a matter of contractual or statutory interpretation the words “and” and “or” are sometimes interpreted “conjunctively” or “disjunctively” depending on context. Using these uncommon words in a search string will open the door to retrieving the relevant case law to help answer legal questions involving how a court might interpret these common words in a contract or a statute.
Although it cannot be doubted that more and more legal research will be dependent on the use of online tools, whether through publicly accessible sites like CanLII.org or privately purchased commercial tools like WestlawNextCanada or Lexis Advance, hard copy books should not be discounted until such time as these books are converted to an electronic format and made widely available to the legal community in such format. While I am a veteran research lawyer who can easily shift to an online legal research world and discover the keywords necessary to retrieve relevant case law where the interpretation of a common word is at stake, the less experienced legal researcher might struggle.
The take away is that while legal publishers need to rapidly convert paper titles into electronic format, legal researchers must appreciate that there will always remain potential frailties in online legal research and that great care and thought sometimes is required to locate and retrieve the necessary cases on point.
Thank you to Stephen for allowing us to reprint his post here.
The Manitoba Law Library would like to acknowledge with gratitude that we are situated on Treaty One Territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree and Dakota peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.
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