November/December 2003 issue
Print vs. Electronic Research: Are You Reinventing the Wheel?
by Kris Albertus, Reference/CALR Librarian
Are you relying solely on CALR resources for your legal research? Are you certain
you're retrieving all the case law on a topic with your searches? Maybe you're
retrieving too many results and getting tired of experimenting with various search
restrictors? It's not unheard of for attorneys to spend hours at a time running searches
on one issue or another. As powerful as the Westlaw and Lexis databases are, you might
save yourself some considerable time and frustration if you venture off-line!
There are two criteria for effective online searches: precision and recall. A precise
search retrieves only the information most relevant to your question, while a search
with good recall retrieves all relevant information. In legal research, falling short
on precision will leave you sifting through results for the right cases, and falling
short on recall will leave you wondering if you found all the cases you should. It's
a balancing act that even expert searchers have difficulty with sometimes.
Basically, it comes down to using all the right search terms. In many areas of law
the terminology varies according to jurisdiction. A simple example of this is the law
regarding dog bites. Obviously you want to include the terms ‘dog' and ‘bite' in a
search. You may need to truncate your search for the word bite to ‘bit!', so you can
pick up terms like ‘bites', ‘bitten', etc. It would also be wise to include synonyms
for the word bite, such as ‘injury' and ‘attack', otherwise you may miss some cases.
As far as the term ‘dog', you probably need to use additional terms such as ‘animal'
and ‘pet'. This is a fairly simple area of law to research, so consider the search term
implications for more complicated areas of law!
Traditional print resources can eliminate much of the time and frustration that goes
into formulating searches. Chances are the work you put into some of your online
research has already been done by the professional editors who research legal issues
for legal encyclopedias, digests, nutshells and hornbooks. These print sources can be
just as powerful as online databases, sometimes more so because of the added value they
provide.
Legal encyclopedias such as American Jurisprudence (AmJur) or American Law Reports
(ALR) provide you with summaries of particular legal issues along with case annotations,
cites to statutes and helpful law review articles. This is great one-stop shopping,
especially for those beginning research in an unfamiliar area of law. Digests are
incredible time-savers, because they group case law into subject areas, regardless of
the variable terminology that may appear in relevant cases. Nutshells are great little
mini-treatises that summarize a particular legal subject and provide you with cites to
the major primary law on which it is based. Hornbooks are similar to nutshells in terms
of the summaries they provide, but they also offer significantly more detail.
Another part of the value of these print resources is that they provide the researcher
with finding aids -- tools that point you to the desired subject heading, chapter,
section number, or page number. These tools include topical spine labels, tables of
contents, indices, case tables and statute tables. Each of these resources employs one
or more of these finding aids to help a researcher locate the information he or she
needs quickly.
The index is probably the most complex and powerful of these tools. The indexer for a
publication tries to anticipate all the possible terms by which you might search a
topic, so that you can either find the desired information with a direct reference or
a cross-reference. This is essentially the same process you go through when you
brainstorm for search terms in an online database, so why reinvent the wheel?
There are some drawbacks to print resources. A print resource is only as good as its
finding aids. Some indices are limited to a predetermined number of pages, so they're
not as detailed as they should be. Sometimes an indexer fails to anticipate a possible
search term. Maybe the table of contents is too general. Another downside to traditional
print resources is that they're usually not as current as the online databases. You may
wait weeks or months for a current pocket part or supplement to arrive.
Since currency is often as important as relevance in legal research, this is not a point
that can be easily dismissed, but it doesn't mean the value of print resources is
outweighed by it. Rather, it suggests that the most effective and efficient way to
conduct legal research is to use a print resource for your initial research and follow
up with online resources for the most recent information.
So before you immediately jump into any number of online databases for your next round
of research, consider visiting your library to consult one of these print resources.
For those of you with an aversion to any sort of print research, you'll be happy to know
some of these print resources are also moving online. Westlaw and Lexis know their value
as well!
At any rate, if your legal issue has already been nicely researched, why not rely on
that information and then update it with online resources as necessary? Doing so could
save you considerable time and energy!
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