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Law Library
(Sir John Salmond Library)
The University of Adelaide
SA 5005
AUSTRALIA
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Online full-text journal research

Searching the full-text of journal articles gives us another way to conduct legal research. It provides less of a topical approach to research and instead allows us to search for quotes, references and similar fact scenarios.

Full-text searching of the online journal literature, that is searching for text within the journal article itself (not just retrieving a full text article) is available on a number of legal databases. Because these are generally very large databases your search strategy needs to be quite specific, unless you have the time to sort through hundreds or even thousands of search results. An introduction to some of the major law journal databases is provided below.

Legal Online
The Australian journal content from Thomson Reuters is now available in full-text from Legal Online, although it is currently limited to published material from 2001 onwards. You can browse individual journals by title, volume and issue, using the left panel contents frame; or you can conduct a keyword search for author / title, references to cases or to legislation. This search can be conducted across multiple journals or a single journal title.

LexisNexisAU
From this search screen, see a listing at *All prescribed sources, showing the journals available in full text. PDF versions of the articles are available here, giving page numbers - which are not available in LexisNexis (see below).

LexisNexis
This is a large US based legal database with content including case and statute law, commentary services, academic and trade literature. When using LN you first need to identify the database which you want to search. There are a number of ways to locate the full-text journal databases on LexisNexis, the easiest is to perhaps browse the directory. Articles on LexisNexis do not include page numbers.

Browse the Directory option

choose to search by Source (red tab options on top left of screen)
make sure the Legal tab is checked. This then displays the homepage for US legal materials.
scroll down to "Find Laws by Country or Region" and click "View more sources"
Click on "Australia" then on "Journals" this then displays all the Australian law journals full-text on this platform
note the breadcrumb to get this selection: Legal > Find Laws by Country or Region > Australia > Journals
clicking on any journal title takes you to the database search screen for that journal, or you can select to search across more than one title using the "Combined Sources" button

Points to note:

the page icon adjacent each title indicates you are at the database level (there are no further sub-folders)
the [I] icon will provide detailed information on the database, including source, field descriptors, currency, file name, etc.
note that the first database option listed Australian Law Journals, Combined is a amalgam of all the other database files listed
the file name for Australian Law Journals, Combined is AUST;AUJNLS

Search for a particular journal on LexisNexis
If you want to determine if LN holds a particular journal, select the "Find a Source" tab then enter the journal title in the search box and click Find. Your search may yield more than one result. Simply select the appropriate file name and you will be taken to the database search screen.

Westlaw
Westlaw, like LexisNexis, enables browsing for journals as well as direct links to database files if you know the name of the file. Westlaw also has a search wizard to allow you to find databases by content.

Hein Online

Hein Online is a database of over 700 full text law journals. Although it covers predominantly US titles it does include many of the major international law titles, and is rapidly adding on the law reviews from Australian universities. The documents in Hein Online are scanned and searchable using OCR technology.

What distinguishes Hein Online from both Lexis and Westlaw is that Hein offer full text journal coverage of all titles from volume 1.

So to give an example of coverage:

Journal	Hein Online	Westlaw	LexisNexis
Yale Law Journal	(1891)+	v.91 (1981)+	V.92 (1982)+

Hein Online therefore complements the coverage in both Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Hein Online search options include:

Citation Navigator - searching by citation at top right of screen
Alphabetical browse by journal title, then by volume, then by contents
Author/Title and Journal title search
Full text word and phrase searches

The search result of a citation search is below (vol.1 Sydney Law Review p.1)

Note the display options along the 3rd toolbar:

contents of the volume
scroll to previous page or next page, or select required page with drop down box
change text size
citations
print options usually offer printing the current page you are viewing, or printing the document

Kluwer Online

Kluwer journals online provides online fulltext access to Kluwer journals, not just the law titles. You can browse titles by subject area and the screenshot below shows a listing of subheadings under Law. Just click on the adjacent + to see the titles listed.

Oxford journals online

The Library has online access to all the academic journals published by Oxford University Press. These journals can be browsed by title and volume no. or searched. They are also grouped by category, so it is easy to view all law journals available in this package.

The screenshot below lists the law journals available on Oxford Online, all can easily be accessed via a title search of the Catalogue.

Academic OneFile (InfoTrac)

Academic OneFile is an interdisciplinary index to scholarly and general-interest journals and magazines. Coverage is very broad, from the Journal of Biological Chemistry to Popular Mechanics, and includes most areas of academic enquiry, as well as many areas of popular culture. The full text of articles is available for many of the journals indexed.

Searching print journals

The best method is to become familiar with the main journals published in your area of interest. The journal collection in the Law Library (apart from the International law material) is arranged alphabetically by title of journal, rather than by legal topic.