You’re a busy lawyer in a small or solo practice. You know where to find case law but what about all that other stuff that helps you prepare your cases? Where do you go to find out about playground design in the 1960s for a patent infringement case? How do you go about disinterring a body from a common grave in Ontario – or find the next of kin for the other people in that grave?
First step: Key concepts
Figure out the key concepts in the research problem you are trying to solve and write them down. This will help you identify synonyms and see if you have the best terms to describe the idea. Prime example: What word do you use to describe the people who lived in Canada before European settlers moved in? The labels “Indian,” “Aboriginal,” “First Nations,” and, more recently, “Indigenous,” have all applied at one time or another to the same concept. The label that works best depends on the sources you are checking and the age of those sources. Current newspaper articles probably use “Indigenous” but government reports from the 1960s most likely use “Indian.”
Second step: Combining concepts
Search engines and databases permit you to combine different concepts using the logic formulas developed by a 19th century math whiz named George Boole. Boolean operators work like this in your search strategy:
- “kittens AND puppies” will look for only those articles that include both search terms. This is a precise search.
- “kittens OR puppies” will look for all articles containing the word “kittens” or the word “puppies.” This search will yield more results but also will contain more irrelevant results.
- “kittens NOT puppies” will only return results with the word kittens and will exclude the anything that also contains the word puppies.
Using the Indian example, we might structure the search like this: Housing AND (indigenous OR aboriginal OR indian OR “first nations”) NOT (sports OR teams OR baseball).
This example will look for articles that include the concept of housing and the people who lived here before the Europeans came but will exclude articles about, say, the Cleveland Indians.
Boolean operators are most useful when searching in commercial databases or library catalogues but you can also use them with web search engines.
Third step: Subject heading vs keyword vs full text
There are three ways of using the same word in your search and each allows you to improve the relevance of your search results.
- Subject headings describe what the resource – for example, a book – is about. People who assign them to resources use standardized authorities like the Library of Congress Subject Headings or Canadian Subject Headings. This means all other books on the same topic will use the same subject heading. The library catalogue is a perfect example. If you look for materials by searching for subject headings you will retrieve results that should be the most relevant to your topic.
- Keywords are not as rigorous as subject headings. They are mostly assigned by computer. They identify important words or phrases in the article but do not necessarily capture what the article is about in the same way as subject headings. If you can limit your search to keywords in the abstract of an article, your search should return relevant materials.
- Full text is the equivalent of throwing your search terms against the wall and seeing what sticks. It means the word or phrase shows up somewhere in the article but without any sense of context or relevance.
Not sure what the best terms for your concepts are? Head to the website of large academic, public or national library and check the catalogue. Be sure to select “subject headings” since most library sites default to keyword search. See what terms they use to describe the topic.
Fourth step: Relevance and reliability
The purpose behind explaining concepts, Boolean operators and subject headings is to give you the tools to make the best use of your time once you actually dive into sources and begin the hunt. You want to find the most relevant material, but it also needs to be reliable and credible. If you find a source in a library catalogue, someone has reviewed it and selected it because the contents are trustworthy or significant. The same cannot be said for the first page of your internet search results. Wikipedia articles are only as good as the footnotes so be sure to check them and click on them to make sure they are still valid. Was the article written from one source? Are the links all broken? Good questions to ask about any website are: Is this reliable information? Is it easy to tell who created the website? It it an authoritative source like a government or institution? If there is no “about me” or “contact us” page, be wary about the contents.
Fifth step: Sources
Where to search? We all use Google but it is good to think beyond a search engine or even the internet. Your local public library is a good place to start. They may have books on your topic. They have database subscriptions to general newspapers and magazines, reference sources like encyclopedias and specialized directories. As long as you have a library card you can probably access many of the electronic resources from your office computer for free.
Your public library may, like the one in Ottawa, have a reciprocal arrangement with college and university libraries that allow registered users to borrow books, consult scholarly journals and search specialized databases from any of the four library systems. This is particularly valuable when hunting for older publications not likely to be found online. And remember: not everything is online. Other key sources for information are archives, experts you can interview and think tanks or associations. Most libraries have directories to help find specialists.
Are you looking for international information? Background on Brexit, for example, will have subtle (or not so subtle) differences if written for American audiences compared to content written for a British audience. You should select your sources accordingly.
Sixth step: The web
When doing internet searches, keep in mind the vast amount of information that search engines do not index. This may include:
- pages with paywalls
- pages not linked to
- pages that block search engines from crawling them
- the social web or discussion forums
- commercial databases
- certain file formats
- a database within a website
- pages removed by request from search engine indexes
These tips should help you to better research and save your valuable time.
Kirsten J. Smith is a research librarian and proprietor of digitalsmith.ca. You can reach her at kirsten@digitalsmith.ca.