Law & Society

Introduction

This guide is designed to help students in Law & Society find sources for your final project. The Newspapers tab lists some useful databases for finding news articles. The Journals tab lists approved journals with peer-reviewed articles you can use for the project. The Tips for Finding Articles tab will give you some helpful information about finding articles. The About Interlibrary Loan tab explains how to get access to articles that aren’t included in the library’s subscriptions. 

If you have questions about this guide or need research assistance, contact us at library@carolinu.edu or (336)714-7894!

Databases

For this project, you’ll need to find some news articles about your topic. The library subscribes to several databases that include newspaper articles. These databases are great places to start in searching for news: 
 
  • Regional Business News - While this database focuses on business-related topics, it also includes general newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. 
  • Newspaper Source Plus - This database includes a broad range of over 800 full text newspapers, plus additional newspapers that are indexed and easily available through interlibrary loan. 
  • Points of View Reference Center - This database includes many different kinds of sources including a great selection of newspapers. Just be sure to limit your source type to newspapers to exclude the other types of sources. 

Scholarly Journals

Use these journals to find peer-reviewed articles for this assignment. The links provided will take you to the journal’s page in one of our library databases or the publisher website. From there you can search or browse the articles and read them if full text is available. If full text is not available, request the article through interlibrary loan.

See Tips for Finding Articles for information on how to search within or browse these journals. 

Law Reviews

Law reviews are law journals published by law schools. For this project, you can use articles from law reviews from any ABA-accredited law school. 
  • Law Review Commons - This open access platform provides free articles from over 300 law reviews. Just be sure to check to make sure the school that publishes the law review is ABA accredited by checking against a list of ABA law schools.

Advanced Search Strategies

Typing your search terms into the search box of any of our library databases or our discovery service will perform a basic search, but you can click "Advanced Search" beneath the search box to make your search more narrow or more broad.
 
Here are a few tips to make the most of your advanced searching: 
 
Use Boolean operators
The words “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT” can be used to broaden or narrow your search. Use these by placing them in between your search terms in all caps. “AND” will bring back results that use both search terms, “OR” will bring back results with either search term, and “NOT” will bring back results with the first search term but not the second. 
 
Search within specific fields
You can use the dropdowns to the right of the advanced search boxes to specify which part of the item the search terms should appear in. So if you wanted to search for the word “business” in the title of the article, you would select “TI Title” in the dropdown. Other fields you can search include journal title, author, subject terms, and abstract.
 
Use limiters
The limiters underneath the advanced search boxes can help you narrow you search results in lots of different ways. For example, if you are only interested in online resources, you can select “Online Full Text Only” and your search results will exclude physical books in the library. If you select the “Peer Reviewed” box, your search results will only include articles that are included in peer reviewed journals. 

 

Limit your Search to Certain Publications

One possible way to search is to use the library’s discovery search and then limit your search to only the journals you are interested in. To do this, start by typing your search terms into the search bar on the library website. 
Next, look at the limiters on the left side of the screen. Click Filter by Publication, then click Show More at the bottom of the list of publications. 

You’ll see this box of titles pop up; you can scroll through the list and check the boxes for journals that are approved for your project. 
After you click update, your results will only show articles from the journals that you checked!

 

Limit Publication Years

Since you want to find the most recent academic articles on your subject, you’ll want to limit your search by publication date. To do that in the library discovery search, find the publication date limiters on the left side of the screen. Highlight the year in the box under “From:” to change the beginning date of your publication range. 

Type 2017 into the box, hit Enter on your keyboard, and you will see results published between 2017 and the present day!

Search Within a Single Publication

You may choose to find artilces by conducting keyword searches in different journals individually. Since the journals you'll be looking at will be in different databases, searching with them will look a little different. 

HeinOnline
To search within a publication that is in the HeinOnline database, all you have to do is type into the search box that appears underneath the journal title. 
 
EBSCO Databases
To search within a publication from the library’s discovery service or databases that are provided by EBSCO, click “Search within this publication” on the journal’s page. 

You’ll see a search with the pre-filled terms JN (which stands for journal and means your search is finding the words that follow in the journal field of the results) and the title of the journal. 

To search within, you need to type the word AND after the title of the journal, then type your keywords. Without the AND, the search will only look for your keywords in the journal title field, and it will probably not return any results. 
JSTOR
In JSTOR there is no search box on the journal pages, but you can use an advanced search to limit your search to a particular journal. Start by clicking “Advanced Search” from the JSTOR homepage. 
From there, you can type in your keywords, then type in the journal’s tite where it says “Journal or Book Title.” It’s also a good idea to change the first Publication Date field to 2017 so that you make sure you get the most recent results. 
 
Publisher Websites
On a publisher website, there will usually be a search button somewhere on the page that will give you an option to search within the journal. 

 

Interlibrary Loan

Some articles are indexed in library databases, but are not available to you immediately in full text. However, you can still get the full text of these articles through interlibrary loan. There are several ways to request an article through interlibrary loan. 
 
If you find an indexed article in an EBSCO database or in the library’s discovery service, you’ll see a link that says “Request this item through interlibrary loan.” Clicking that button will take you to a pre-filled out form with the item information. All you have to do it put in your contact information in the top part of the form. 

 

 

You can also directly request an interlibrary loan by filling out the form directly yourself at this link.
 

Finally, if you find an article on a publisher website or in HeinOnline and you don’t want to fill out the form above, you can email the library at library@carolinau.edu. Please include a link to the record to make it easier for us to identify the article.