For a comprehensive guide on conducting articles research, see our guide on Articles for Legal and Non-Legal Research.
Williams Law Library provides access to three full-text law journal databases: Westlaw, Lexis, and HeinOnline. Full-text databases provide access to the full-text of articles. These databases also allow you to do keyword searches through the full-text of articles.
However, these databases do not provide comprehensive coverage of all legal journals and other publications, such as trade publications. To do a comprehensive article search, you will also need to use journal indexes.
To do a comprehensive search of the journal literature on your topic, you must use journal indexes. Indexes generally do not provide the full-text of each article; instead, indexes collect the citation information and abstracts of all the articles in individual journals, typically starting at each journal's first volume. These articles are cataloged with subject headings when they are included in the index. Indexes, therefore, allow you to perform a comprehensive article search using keywords and subject terms.
Because an index collects all the issues of individual journal titles, they are good resources for researching older and historic articles. Older articles can be particularly helpful when researching the history of particular policies or laws.
Below are indexes available through the library: