Too Many Results? There Are Hacks for That!

Have you ever run a search and been overwhelmed by the results you got back?

Me too. Here are a couple of my favorite hacks for focusing research to limit the results to more items that are more likely to be useful. Let's suppose we want to find law review articles and news stories about congressional oversight hearings (how do they work? what's the history? when do committees subpoena witnesses?).

Hack 1: Require Term in the Title

In Westlaw's Law Reviews & Journals database, the search "congressional oversight" turns up 4,904 documents. That's far too many to deal with. Searching for "oversight" to be in the title should help focus. And it does! "congressional oversight" & ti(oversight) gets us just 125 articles. And those articles seem highly relevant. E.g.,

• Former Sen. Carl Levin & Elise J. Bean, Defining Congressional Oversight and Measuring Its Effectiveness, 64 Wayne L. Rev. 1 (2018)
• Michael A. Livermore, Political Parties and Presidential Oversight, 67 Ala. L. Rev. 45 (2015)

You can do the same thing in Lexis's Law Reviews and Journals database,  "congressional oversight" yields 4,474 articles. But congressional oversight & title(oversight) yields just 116.

Note that in news databases you use "headline" instead of "title: In Major Newspapers in Lexis, "congressional oversight" turns up 7,957 stories. "congressional oversight" and headline(oversight) turns up 277.

Hack 2: Require Term to Appear a Lot

In Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law, you can require that a term appears a certain number of times with the "atleast" operator. For example, in Lexis (staying with law reviews), we can search for "congressional oversight" & atleast7(subpoena) turns up 224 articles.

In Westlaw's journals, "congressional oversight" & atleast20(hearing) brings us 569 articles. Changing it to atleast40(hearing) reduces the harvest to 204 articles. And atleast75(hearing) cuts the list to 64—articles that presumable discuss hearings a lot.

In Bloomberg Law News, "congressional oversight" turns up 408 stories. But when I add and atleast5(trump), the list is down to just 26.


PRACTICE
Try out some searches of your own.

• Find law review articles about "wrongful convictions" or "exonerations." How does it affect your search results if you require "exonerat!" to be in the title? How about if you require it to appear 10 times?
• Find news stories about Columbia River dams and salmon. How many have "salmon" in the headline? 

Law Librarian Research Hack: Congressional Research Service Reports

Hack #11: Finding CRS Reports (the CRS might as well stand for “Crazy Reliable Sources”)

Within the Library of Congress lives an agency called the Congressional Research Service (CRS). The CRS exists for the sole purpose of providing members of Congress with "comprehensive and reliable legislative research and analysis that are timely, objective, authoritative and confidential." The idea is that in order to make informed decisions, legislators need accurate and unbiased information related to the topics on which they are proposing and passing laws.

CRS' research and analysis often comes in the form of reports, although the researchers also generate several other types of publications. The reports, which are on a wide range of topics, are well-researched and full of useful information. Given the thorough and nonpartisan nature of the CRS reports, they make an excellent starting point for any research project. Perhaps most helpfully, the reports are often heavily footnoted and can point you to other relevant sources (both primary and secondary). If you can find a CRS report (or really any CRS publication) on-point for your research topic, go out and buy a lottery ticket because it's your lucky day!

So where do you go to find these wonderfully useful resources? Well, there's a research guide for that! Specifically, the Gallagher Law Library's guide to Congressional Research Services Reports. The guide includes links to several resources, both free and UW licensed. Note that coverage and search capabilities for each resource varies.

For the most recent CRS materials, check out the relatively new Library of Congress repository available at crsreports.congress.gov. This site was created following passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, which directed the Librarian of Congress to make all non-confidential written CRS products freely available to the public online. It includes new publications and an ever-growing backfile of older publications (I was able to locate CRS reports from as far back as October 2008). It also has the added bonus of not only including CRS reports, but other types of publications generated by the CRS (Legal Sidebars, In Focus, and written testimony from CRS experts called before Congress). 

The site is keyword searchable, but you can also just browse through the latest publications on the site by clicking the “SEARCH” button without entering any terms in the search bar. Doing so gives you an idea of the variety of topics that members of Congress are interested in. For example, fourteen new publications were uploaded to the site yesterday (June 18, 2019). A sampling of the titles of those items include:

• Juneteeth: Fact Sheet
• 2018 Far Bill Primer: Support for Local Food Systems
• Introduction to U.S. Economy: Fiscal Policy
• Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs: Background Issues for Congress
• Saudi Arabia

If you are looking for older CRS reports, you'll want to search one of the other available sources. EveryCRSReport.com in particular is easy to use and has extensive holdings (nearly 15,000 publications) dating back to the 1970s.

If you want to know more about what CRS does, there is (appropriately) a 2011 CRS report titled The Congressional Research Service and the American Legislative Process.

Practice!

Imagine that a supervisor would like you to do a research project regarding the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) during your summer internship. You know nothing about the FDCPA. See if you can locate a helpful publication from the CRS on this topic. How about net neutrality? Or navy ship naming? Try using both crsreports.congress.gov and EveryCRSReport.com. Do you get the same results?

Law Librarian Research Hack: Docket Tracking

Hack #9: Setting up alerts in Bloomberg to track new docket entries. 

Do you need to keep track of an ongoing case but don't want to waste your time looking it up every day just to discover that there have been no updates? Then consider setting up an alert with Bloomberg! By setting up an alert, the database will send you frequent updates when new docket entries have been added. You can customize your alert and track multiple cases at once! Using this "set it and forget it" technique you can take comfort in knowing that you will be notified when new entries are added. 

If you have a docket that you would like regular updates for, you first need to log into Bloomberg (subscription required) and locate that docket. Once in the docket, on the left side of "General Info" there is a "Track Docket" button. 

Pro tip: Note that there is also an "Update Docket" button. It is always wise to update any docket when you are viewing its contents. 

In the "Track Docket Options" box, customize how you would like to receive this alert. You can add your own personal tags*, description, search terms, pick your frequency (weekly, daily, custom), and what time in the day you would like the alert. Add your email in the "distribute to" box. You can add multiple emails so you can easily have alerts sent to your work and personal emails. You can even send them to your colleague or peers! Once you click "Accept" you are set up to receive alerts! 

If you need to modify or delete any of your alerts, go to the top of any Bloomberg page and click on the "My Work History" tab and select "Alerts" and click on "Manage Your Alerts." You will be able to view your alerts on the "Alerts Management" page. The edit feature is on the far right column, you can click on the pencil icon of any alert to update or change that alert. If you would like to delete an alert, select the alert and click "Delete". 

*Personal tags can be added by going to the "Settings" tab on the "Alerts Management" page. 

Practice exercise! 
Log into Bloomberg and select the docket option. Type in "U.S. Supreme Court Dockets" in the "Courts" search bar. Then add docket number "17-778" (Jamar Alonzo Quarles vs. United States) and click "Search". Click into the case and follow the instructions above to create a docket tracking alert. Then go into the "Alerts Management" page to see how you can modify your alert. 

Law Librarian Research Hack: There's a research guide for that!

Hack #8: Using non-law research guides from other disciplines and other institutions

Photo by Bit Cloud on Unsplash

The Gallagher Law Library has a list of research guides to help you navigate your way through researching a spectrum of legal topics and areas of law. Research guides are compiled by librarians or subject specialists who have done the work of finding relevant and authoritative resources for you. They're the perfect jump start to help direct your research process and make it more efficient and organized.

But what if there's not a legal research guide on your topic? Getting started can feel overwhelming. Most legal topics are inter-disciplinary, so you can look to non-law research guides for help. Fortunately, our friends at UW Libraries have 468 research guides in 56 subjects that are available to you!

Researching the history of animal rights or gender rights and can't find a legal research guide? Guess, what? UW Libraries has research guides on these subjects! If you're researching animal rights, start by looking at the guides alphabetically by subject and you'll find the Animal Studies guide. This guide includes a link to Michigan State University's Animal Legal & Historical Center where you can find information and resources on animal issues by legal topic, compare laws across 50 states, as well as find articles and other resources. It's a guide within a guide! If you're researching gender rights, consider consulting the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies guide, also available to find by subject. In addition to traditional print and online resources, guides like this one include video and image resources, too.

You might be thinking that this is all really great, but what if the Law Library and UW Libraries do not have a research guide on a topic you're researching, like autonomous vehicles? You can look to research guides from other institutions! How do I do that, you ask? Here is a very scientific way: Go to Google, type research guide [enter your subject/topic] into the search bar, and press enter.

Voila! There's a research guide for that! In fact, within the first page of results there are three great research guides for autonomous vehicles (consult your friendly librarian for help determining a reputable research guide): the NCSL Guide on Autonomous Vehicles, the AAMVA Autonomous Vehicle Information Library and Northwestern University Libraries guide on Motor Vehicles & Drivers: Autonomous Vehicles.

Research guides outside of your institution may link to freely accessible resources, but they may also link to resources only available to patrons of that institution. For example, the Northwestern University guide lists a book titled Autonomous driving: technical, legal and social aspects that is hyperlinked to their library catalog. Of course you can't check this item out from their library, but you can copy the title of the book into the UW Libraries catalog to see if we have it, and we do!

Practice exercise!

See if you can find a research guide from UW libraries on a topic of your choice. Under Start Your Research, click on research guides and look By Subject, All Guides, or enter your subject or keyword(s) into the Search for Guides search bar. Did you find a research guide on your topic? Or related guide(s) with relevant information and resources?

Now see if you can find a research guide from another institution by searching in Google as described above. Did you find legal and non-legal research guides? See if you can find a book in one of the research guides that UW libraries has, too. Maybe you just found your next book to read!

Research Hack: Ways to Browse & Search for New Articles

Want to follow new scholarship in your area? Want to search for articles? Want to do it free? Check out the Digital Commons Network and SSRN.

Digital Commons Network

Hundreds of colleges and universities use Digital Commons, a platform for posting publications by faculty, students, departments, and so on. The institutions pay to use the platform, but finding papers and downloading them is free to users.

UW Law is among those hundreds of institutions: UW Law Digital Commons has a growing collection of papers by faculty, articles and comments from the Washington Law Review and the Washington International Law Journal, and more.

Of course it's fun to browse UW Law's pages, but for research it's much more powerful to browse or search whole Digital Commons Network. A colorful wheel gives you a graphical way to visualize the different fields that are covered.

Digital Commons subject wheel. The caption in the center is
"Explore 3,166,425 works from 586 institutions."
A pop-up over part of the orange ring says "Explore Judges."
At the upper left is data about what's in the collection under Judges—
Works: 5,463; Institutions: 144; Downloads: 1,874,756

Law Librarian Research Hack: Survey Says!

Hack #6: Using 50-State or Multi-State Surveys

Photo credit: @loney_planet on Unsplash

50-State or Multi-State Surveys are compilations of state statutes or regulations on a particular topic. They can be incredibly valuable when you need to quickly track down laws from multiple jurisdictions.

As an illustration of just how useful they can be, imagine yourself in this scenario: It's 4:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. A partner in your firm just asked you to pull the law on adverse possession for each state in the Ninth and Tenth Circuits before you go home for the weekend. You were hoping to leave the office at 4:30 p.m. to beat traffic as you head out of town for your annual pilgrimage to Viking Fest in Poulsbo, Washington. Two alternate endings to this story are:

1. You Google each state and "adverse possession" and sort through the results hoping that one of them will lead you to the correct statutory citation. You compile the list, fret about whether or not it is accurate, submit it to the partner at 6:00 p.m., get in your car, and eventually make it to Poulsbo (after sitting in some brutal traffic). Throughout the weekend, you are worried about the quality of your work and, as a result, are too nervous to participate in the annual donut eating contest.

2. You pull up the 50-State survey on adverse possession in Westlaw's 50 State Statutory Surveys or through the National Survey of State Laws on HeinOnline. You quickly gather the information for the states in question, consolidate it into a memo to the partner, review the actual statutes to verify the information is accurate and up-to-date, send it off, and hit the road by 4:45 p.m. The partner is impressed with the quick turn-around and your relaxed mindset allows you to handily win the lutefisk eating contest.

Clearly we'd all prefer the latter scenario (perhaps minus the lutefisk), and you can see how 50-State or Multi-Jurisdiction surveys can make your research more efficient.

There are a number of places where you can track down these surveys and many of the available resources are outlined for you in the Gallagher Law Library's 50-State & Multi-Jurisdiction Surveys research guide. By far the most comprehensive listing of available state surveys is the Subject Compilations of State Laws by our very own Cheryl Nyberg. This publication outlines available topical surveys from a number of different sources, including Westlaw, Lexis, law review articles, court opinions or briefs, relevant organizations, and more! You can either browse by topic or (if using the electronic version available through HeinOnline) run a keyword search,

As a practical matter, always be sure to note the date the survey was created and verify that the citations listed are accurate by actually reviewing the statute.

Practice exercise!

Using the Subject Compilation of State Laws on HeinOnline, locate a survey containing state voter ID laws and identify the citation for your home state. Use Westlaw, Lexis, or your state legislature's website to confirm the citation is accurate.

Law Library Research Hack: Library Links

Hack #4: Linking Your Library to Google Scholar

You might be aware of the powers of a library's catalog. You may also be aware of the advanced search engine of Google Scholar. But did you know that you can combine the two to make one superpower advance research tool? That's right! You can add your academic library's collection to your Google Scholar in three easy steps! Follow the steps below and Google Scholar will remember to search through your chosen library's full-text resources.

1. Open Google Scholar in your browser of choice and click on the three horizontal lines in the top left corner. Next, you will click on the "Settings" button. 

    

2. Then select "Library Links."

3. In the search bar, type in the University/College/library that you have an affiliation with* and then click the search button. Google Scholar will give you a list of academic libraries to choose from, select your library and click "save."

    

Voila! You have successfully linked your library's catalog to Google Scholar! To double check, or to add more libraries (you can link up to five), click on the "library link" and repeat! You will notice under the search bar which libraries you have already saved! 

Practice time! 

Follow steps 1-3 to add your library's catalog to Google Scholar. Then type in a book or article title to see what results are retrieved from Google Scholar AND your library. Google Scholar will display a link to the free, full-text version of the resource on the righthand side. You will need to do this for each of your devices and does not automatically change each of your Google Scholar search engines. Hopefully, this will streamline your research and cut down on the places you need to look for resources! 

*Most library subscriptions are limited to users affiliated with that library. Once you select an item on Google Scholar that is provided through the library link, most libraries will ask you to login with your credentials before you can access their online materials. 

Law Librarian Research Hack: Searching across all titles in West Academic Study Aids

Hack #3: Using the search bar in West Academic to search across all titles

Have you used the study aids in West Academic? The study aids available to you include series such as Black Letter Outlines, Hornbooks, Gilbert Law Summaries, Sum and Substance Audio and more! You can also search for study aids by subject for 1L, 2L or 3L classes such as Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Family Law, etc.

Searching by subject or series can be useful if you’re studying for a specific class or know the series you are looking for. But what if you’re looking to find out more about dog law, or spite fences? There’s not a subject or series that is easily identifiable to search within for these topics.

Never fear, the search bar is here!

By using the search bar, you are searching across all available titles, subjects and series in West Academic. This is a quick and powerful way to find resources on your topic. For example, enter “spite fence” in the search bar:

Click on search and see the results. The keyword(s) you used in the search bar will be highlighted in blue in the results list. This blue text is hyperlinked and will take you directly to the area in the chosen resource where your topic is discussed or mentioned.

Using the Filter Results feature on the left side bar, you can identify the Type of resource. You can click on any one of the options listed within your chosen filter.  Do you want a Hornbook? Outline? Overview?

You can also search within a specific subject area, or limit by series: 

Practice exercise!
Now it's your turn! Want to find out more about adverse possession? Enter "adverse possession" into the search bar. How many total results did you retrieve? How many different series does "adverse possession" appear in? In the Short and Happy Series, how many titles cover your topic?

Answers: (total results = 82, total number of series = 20, total number of titles in Short and Happy Series = 6)

Law Librarian Research Hack: Go to Oxford for Help

Sometimes you want something more scholarly and deeper than Wikipedia—and yet you still want an accessible source to start with, rather than devoting several weeks to reading a shelf of books. Like Goldilocks, you want something just right. 

For that certain set of information needs, I'm a big fan of Oxford Handbooks Online (available to UW users through the University Libraries). 

• If you want to find a good introduction to what law-and-economics scholars say about medical malpractice, start with Ronen Avraham & Max M. Schanzenbach, Medical Malpractice, in 2 The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics (Francesco Parisi ed., 2017). You'll find a 30-page PDF—21 1/2 pages summarizing the area, plus pages of references to lead you to important studies.

• Suppose you want to get a framework for comparative constitutional law. What are the themes that scholars look at? What are the big topics? Take a look at The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (Michel Rosenfeld & András Sajó eds., 2012).  

The Oxford Handbooks can be especially useful if you want to get an introduction to a concept from another discipline. The law library has licensed a lot of the law titles, but we also get the benefit of using the ones licensed by other campus libraries!

• If you come across a law review article that's talking about Foucault and you don't know Foucault from Kung Fu, you might try Andrea Mennicken & Peter Miller, Michel Foucault and the Administering of Lives, in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents (Paul Adler et al. eds., 2014).

• What if you want to sample social psychologists' work on social justice? Browse The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice (Phillip L. Hammack Jr. ed., 2016).

"Brasen Nose College, Radcliffe Library & Part of the Schools," from
The Perambulation of Oxford, Blenheim, and Nuneham (1824),
available in the British Library's Flickr photostream

When you search the Oxford Handbooks Online, you can choose to search within one subject. Caution: sometimes a handbook might not be where you expect it. For instance, the handbooks on law and economics aren't in Law (they're in Economics).

You can also run a general search and then filter by subject. And you can also search for words to be in certain fields, like an article's headings or summary.

How do you get to Oxford Handbooks Online if you don't have this link handy? 

• Go to the University Libraries homepage.
• Choose Encyclopedias & Dictionaries.
• Choose Oxford Handbooks Online. 

Now you try it. Search Oxford Handbooks Online for one of these:

• "star wars"
• "game of thrones"
• "hello kitty"
• seattle

This is #2 in our series of posts with short explanations of some of our favorite legal research and writing hacks (shortcuts and work-arounds that can make you more efficient).

Law Librarian Research Hack: Google Operators

This series of posts will include short explanations of some of our favorite legal research and writing short cuts and work-arounds. At the end of each post, we'll include a brief exercise so you can put your new skill into practice.

Hack #1 - Using Google to search particular websites or domains

Google is powerful, but did you know that using advanced search operators allows you to harness that power to make your research more efficient? My favorite of these operators gives you the ability to search all of the content of a website (e.g. nytimes.com, law.uw.edu, usda.gov) or a particular top-level domain (e.g. .gov, .edu, .org). To use it, simply enter your search term(s) in the main Google search bar as normal, then type site:[website or domain you want to search] (make sure there is no space between "site:" and the website or domain).

So, for example, if you want to search all of the Seattle Times website (seattletimes.com) for articles about the proposed permanent daylight saving time, you would enter:

This trick can also be quite helpful if you want to search the content of a website that doesn't have a built-in search feature.

You can also make your searches broader than just one particular website. Let's say you are researching cannabis regulations and you want to find results from all government websites (.gov). You would enter:

Note that using just site:.gov will retrieve results from both federal and state government websites. If you want to narrow your search and only retrieve results from Washington State government websites, you would use site:wa.gov. If you wanted to be even more specific and only find results from the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board website, you would use site:lcb.wa.gov.

Practice exercise!

Find any government website that mentions Bigfoot. Now narrow your search just to your state's government websites. How about Bigfoot articles from your home town newspaper?

Need more?

There are many other Google advanced search operators and you can find articles (like this one) that list available operators and their function.