Periodical Indexes
Posted by Bonnie Lerner on Aug 29, 2008
Two legal periodical indexes are LegalTrac and Index to Legal Periodicals. They are both available as one of the LIC databases. The advantage to using a periodical index is that a periodical index provides you with a great tool to help you find the most relevant articles quickly and easily, because they are professionally indexed. The disadvantage used to be that your results would be a citation and you would then have to locate the actual periodical article in print or through a different electronic database. This is no longer the case. When you use LegalTrac you can limit your results to articles that are in full text. With Index to Legal Periodicals , you can use “LinkSource” to link to the full text of articles. If a pdf is not available, LinkSource will take you to ILLiad (InterLibrary Loan) and fill in the form for you after you log in. So, instead of automatically jumping to Westlaw and Lexis, you might want to reconsider using a periodical index.