Research Guides: U.S. Government Legal Information: Databases

Databases at UD

LegalTrac
LegalTrac provides indexing for more than 1,200 major law reviews, legal newspapers, specialty publications, Bar Association journals, and international legal journals, including more than 200 titles in full text.
Westlaw Campus Research
Westlaw Campus Research is a research service that combines a breadth of news and business information with in depth law-related information.
Includes:
- Current and archival coverage of newspapers, magazines, broadcast transcripts, wires, and trade journals.
- Company Investigator, an authoritative source for researching and gaining insight on more than 30 million public and private companies.
- Topical categories to refine searches and obtain more precise results.
- Expert analysis from hundreds of law reviews and journals, encyclopedias, and treatises.
- Full-text legislation, regulations, and court decisions.
- Integrated research tools, such as template searching, headnotes, case synopses, West Key Number System®, KeyCite®, and hypertext linking to related documents.
Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources with an interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Vendor Lyrasis. Publisher LexisNexis.
HeinOnline Academic
HeinOnline Academic is the world’s largest fully searchable, image-based government document and legal research database. It contains extensive coverage of U.S. statutory materials, U.S. Congressional Documents, all of the world’s constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents. Coverage of United States government publications is comprehensive back to inception, and all titles are exact replicas of the official print publication from the Government Printing Office. A large assortment of international resources are also available.
Contains thousdand of law-related journals on a variety of subjects, all dating back to inception with over 90% available through the current issue or volume. Subject related collections are often curated and made available.

Tips & Tricks for Searching for Articles

Finding articles within databases and journals is not the same process you would use to conduct a search in Google or an internet search engine. You cannot type in a question, but rather need to choose specific keywords and phrases to find results. These tips are similar to how you would search for material in DELCAT.

Helpful Ways to Search:

Use quotations around a phrase to "tell" the database or journal that you want these words to remain together.
- Ex: "American exceptionalism"
Think of synonyms to your keywords...Especially when conducting historical research, you may need to develop words and phrases that were used during that particular time period, rather than modern-day words.
- Ex: World War I; First World War; The Great War - All would give you different results!
Use AND/OR to connect words, concepts, and phrases together to receive specified results.
- Ex: World War I AND United States

Use the Advanced Search option in databases and journals to narrow down by date, region, type of document, and more!