Finding On-Point Articles Using HeinOnline

Guest post by Melanie R. Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel – Manitoba Court of Appeal

I am very thankful for all of the excellent resources that the Great Library provides through our Law Society Member Portal.  My gratitude has increased greatly during the pandemic, while I have been unable to access the law school’s library.  While I often use HeinOnline to locate articles that I have already determined are relevant to my research, I hesitate to run searches of their databases, as the volume of results can be overwhelming.  However, in at least two cases in the past few months, my research has been improved substantially by their “More Like This” feature.  In case you haven’t used it yet, I will walk you through the very simple process.

Once you have located a relevant article in HeinOnline, look at the top of the document for the “More Like This” button.  Click it.  It will bring you to a list of results related to your article.  If you find that they are not particularly helpful, you can tweak the “Interesting Words” weighting on the left-hand side of the screen or remove some of those words.  You can also enter a new filtering term in the “Enter new term” box underneath the “Interesting Words”.  You can also limit your results by date range.

According to HeinOnline:

More Like This uses a program which finds ‘interesting words’ in an article, as determined by an algorithm that analyzes the article’s text. …

More Like This compares all articles in HeinOnline and ranks them in order based on which articles’ interesting words are most similar to the first article. Results include the top 50 most relevant articles available in HeinOnline.

See More Like This in HeinOnline for more information on this very useful feature.