All right. So again, finding and researching your paper topic. These are tips, tools and tactics for writing your paper. I am Meredith Kostek. I am a research instruction and engagement librarian at Bulli Law Library. I probably have seen or you've been in some lawyering classes with me or maybe advanced legal research. This is a different kind of research then maybe you've been tackling and it might feel more familiar. It might be something that you did in undergrad or in graduate school. That's going to feel a little more familiar. So if you are enrolled in an individual individual research credit you will see at the end of this presentation, there is a sign in link. And then you just have to fill it out with some things that you learned today in class, and then your name and then I will turn those all into Dean Davis as part of that requirement. Today we're going to talk about selecting a paper topic, checking for preemption, breaking your research into two parts, the background and the focused part. Then we're going to talk about keeping current you're going to we're going to talk about tracking and managing your research. And then really what to do when you're stuck. We've got a couple of good suggestions for you and sometimes it just takes talking to somebody else to respond to that that interest in your paper. So no matter where you are in the research process, you're going to use that research to build on that research. Then you're going to update that research and absolutely always cite to your research. And one of the worst stories I've ever heard is about a student who got a book through Summit, which is one of our 39 School consortium schools and I think it was up in Washington somewhere and they had this great cite, it was kind of the thing that put all of their paper together. And then when they got to writing it, they realized they hadn't cited the quote correctly. And they'd already turned the book in and so in order to make sure that it was correct, they drove up to Seattle to go and check out the book again because there wasn't enough time to get it before it was due the next day. You don't want to be that person. So make sure you are always citing to your research as you're writing it down. So all of the things that we talked about all of the links, everything is going to be available on the bully LibGuide for this talk, finding and researching your paper topic. The best way to do that is to go to the bully Law Library. Go to your research link or tab, go down to research guides. And then you'll see Finding and research your paper topic right here. These are all the tabs that I just talked about choosing a topic preemption strategies, keeping current managing your research when you get it reach a dead end. And then this final, this final link is going to be workshop and so you'll see if you attended the writing workshop, this is the recording if you didn't have a chance yet to attend that writing workshop. You can watch it here. After today's session we will put in the video replay of this talk along with the slides and I don't know if you noticed at the beginning that this will be otter AI is reporting the what what I say? I will also put the transcript of that but if you're coming to my chat GPT talk on legal research tomorrow. You might know that AI isn't perfect, but it's getting there. And so you might find a couple of things wrong with the AI transcript. But for the most part, it's pretty good and so we will put that here in this workshop tab. In finding and researching your paper topic. But as I said, all of the things we talk about are going to be links current awareness tools. And so as you go through the slides or as you go through thinking about your research, you can come to this research guide and it will help you find all of the things that we talked about today. So choosing a paper topic. Maybe some of you already have come with a paper topic already. And I'm going to go through some ways to find them. You might even find that in another year or another class, you're going to have to choose another paper topic and so come back to these tools and you'll be able to find a paper topic quickly. So we have print and online resources that can help you find a paper topic. We can search the catalog on bully's website. You can browse our shelves downstairs. This is the time when you get to use all of those beautiful books that we have in the quiet area of the library. Um, you can also just browse it from your home because we have a virtual way of doing that. You can read blogs and one of the things that blogs do is they are separated usually by category and so you can read up on a specific area of law and so you can see what's the latest what are people talking about. lexblog is a really great one that does this. And I'm going to show you where to kind of find those things. If you've had me in class before you know that pirates are my favorite thing to talk about. And so we're going to just go ahead and look and see what the maritime blogs are saying and we see that we have you know, wire crimes on cruise ships no longer see what it has to say no longer being disclosed to the US public. And so here's something that maybe is an interesting topic to you and you can look it up you've got already starts to it. You've got statutes, you've got places to look and kind of develop a topic from here. And you saw from that list, there are lots and lots of topics that you can choose from. And this is a really great way maybe you're interested in immigration or probate and estate planning, and it's a way to both subscribe to these blogs and get kind of the updates but also see what's really going on in disability law in employment and labor law and get an idea for a paper topic. You can browse current scholarship in SSRN and digital comments. We're going to go through all of these things because these are the same techniques you're going to use not only to pick, pick a topic but also to check for preemption, and then do your background and focused research. So we'll dive into these a little more after we get to those. The next thing is to use legal news current awareness tools such as law 360 When they send you articles about a specific topic, or a specific area of law you can start to say Oh, I'm really interested in this and develop your topic from there. Legal news such as Bloomberg Westlaw, LexisNexis, and their practice and subject centers are ways to sign up for alerts or to just look through newsletters, end daily which also includes climate wire, energy wire and green wire. Those are environmentally facing newsletters that you can get up to date and they send you I don't know if it's daily or weekly at this point in time, but newsletters that have the what's going on in those areas. of law law 360 Which is again, a Lexus product, and I'll go ahead and show you that now. It is a way to look at an area of law and then sign up for newsletters from there. So here I am on Lexus. I'll go to these nine dots and select law 360. At the top, I can look at all of the sections of law. Maybe I'm interested in, oh gosh, commercial contracts. And here I can sign up for that newsletter and after I sign up for that newsletter, I put in my email address and then I can select more from there. And then once I sign up it will ask me how often I want to receive this. I can receive them once a day once a week or as they come out as they come out is a lot for me. I am constantly checking my email when I have it set up that way. So think about how often you want to receive that but this is a great way to stay up to date on an area of law. Another way to find a topic is looking to where there are circuit splits. So here's an area of law and the Fourth Circuit feels one way the Seventh Circuit feels another way and on Bloomberg under in the United States law week. You can search for the term circuit splits reported. And then once you do that, you can it will tell you circuit split so let's go ahead and look at that. Let's go ahead and use that. And so this is now the specific content that I'm looking at. I just searched for it this afternoon. So here are those circuit splits. And the latest one was in August and so I can look and see what's really kind of happening and so you can see you can go back, see what's all you know, for June and for May and for July, but here is the August one.
And it just lists topic wise, I think the first one is civil procedure. And here's the case Pizza Hut the pain Pangea and who has the burden of showing that a contractual jury trial waiver was knowing and voluntary. So the first Fifth Circuit joins the Sixth Circuit saying that the waivers are assumed enforceable. The second and fourth circuits place a burden on the party looking to enforce the waiver. These are topics ready to be explored and then you can even say okay, well then what's the Ninth Circuit saying? Are they starting to follow the fifth and sixth, the second and fourth were cases and you can look at it through there. And again, you usually have the topics of a procedure civil rights, criminal law, criminal law, employee embedded benefits, you can look through these four topics that are interesting because remember, you're going to be with this paper for several months or maybe even a whole year. As you write it. You don't want to you know, you don't want it being boring or something you aren't interested in anymore to be one more notch in not being able to finish your paper so we want you to find something that is interesting to you. So looking through things like quirky circuit splits will be helpful and finding, finding something that's truly interesting to you. So once you have a topic, the next thing to do is to check for preemption and what preemption is is you're looking for another work that so completely and competently discusses the topic that you cannot significantly add to that discussion. So in other words, it's the same topic, same thesis, same focus. So do you need to find a new topic? Don't worry don't be scared, we can find a friendly solution, I promise. And there are so many options. In fact, I actually like when I found a paper that is sort of on my topic because that gives me an opportunity to look and see how much have they done. What area Have they left off? What area am I interested in? That I can take this further. So you can do a deeper analysis. You can do it from a different point of view. You can do an alternate approach to that same problem. Use different parties rights, right? If it's mostly written about the defendant, look at prosecution, that kind of thing. Or the plaintiff different constitutional or statutory provisions, a different jurisdiction. That's one of the easier ones if the paper or the papers written in the you know, in Massachusetts, you can say what happens in Minnesota. The another very easy way to look at a preemption paper is to start on the date the article was published and see how the law has changed since then. Maybe the article was published in 2017. That's six years ago. And so you can say what's happened in the last six years? Has it been developed? Has it been developed in another state? What's going on now? Has it stopped is it stalled? Or is it gone forward? And that's a way for you to add your own thing to a paper that maybe already has a lot of the elements done for you. So how do you do a preemption check? And this is where we're going to get into looking at how to use the journal article, resources and things like that. And so the first one is looking at journal articles. So I'm going to look and see has someone already written my paper, and HeinOnline is going to be the one that I'm going to recommend for searching for this kind of thing because HeinOnline starts all law journals and law reviews, usually from their very first, their very first edition, so you're going to be able to check the whole thing, whereas Westlaw and Lexus usually started in the late 1990s. And so they just don't have that that longevity that HeinOnline has. So let's go ahead and start with HeinOnline and look for a paper topic. So I'm going to start at bully Law Library, going to go to research a to z databases, select H for high online and then I'm going to go to hide online and I'm going to go to the Law Journal library. If I just use this search bar up here, that means I'm searching all of Heine online, and this is millions of pages of documents. And it just takes a long time and your results are not going to be as as refined as you'd like them. So we can go to that law journal library. And we can search it in a number of ways. We can search it just at this top search bar. And let's see, I think I still have that in there. So maybe I'm interested my topic I've decided on piracy and maritime law and universal jurisdiction and civil procedure within that so I can search it like that. I can also use this advanced search bar to search the text, the title, the author, a description, and so it's searching more specifically. And I can also use modifiers just like I can in the large search bar, and or not, and then within five within 10 and within 25 If you're doing a within en HeinOnline and you're not using those, you can just use the Tildy and then a number so that means within five so let's go ahead and look and see if I find any any results with my looking at universal jurisdiction and maritime law with regards to piracy. And so you see I have 79 results. That's a pretty good number to just kind of glance through and see if I'm on topic and do have I put in enough words, and this is one of those things that you know, after you've picked a topic, sometimes you don't know, you know, what is this called in the in the legal world or I'm using this term is there another term out there? So use multiple terms go through this kind of find the terms that seem to get results and seem to be talking about your area of law and then move from there into more specific terms as you look for articles. You can also refine your search by date. And anything in a preemption search you're probably not going to do that you're looking for has this been done before? So I can go through and I can look and see you know, how are my terms being used one of the things about law review articles, they're oftentimes 50 or 60 pages long. And so if I were just to use this link right here, that would take me to the top page of this article. And my terms might be on page 15 of that or 25. And so it's often easier to go to this turn to page The other nice thing about HeinOnline is I can quickly read through this, this summary of where my terms are being used, but also all of the times my terms are my terms are being used throughout it the other nice thing that will come in handy later. Let's see our how many times it's been the article has been cited in another article and that will help me find additional articles as I'm looking through my topics. So that's fine online and that would be the first place I would look to see if my paper has already been the paper I'm envisioning writing has already been written. You can also use legal track which if you have just a subject area that you're interested in, and you you know you're sort of I'm interested in this area of law what other things are available to me legal track is done by subject. The next place to look is in current scholarship. And that is sometimes when you write a paper it can take up to two years for it to be published. So you might want to look for working papers or pre publications on SSRN called the legal scholarship network, or our digital comments network, which is B press and SSRN. It's kind of the same thing. You go to it you use the Search button here. I'm gonna put in that same search. We'll see what we get and it doesn't like civil procedure. So we're gonna go ahead and take that off let's try it again
and didn't like that either. Huh? Well, I think no results with abstract Advanced Search. We'll try it again. And we'll just take all of it off. We're just gonna look at piracy and maritime law. No universal jurisdiction. So it's possible maybe I'm not finding the things that I'm looking for. Like here we have piracy and maritime law and we can see what what all we have. We have 26 papers. They're currently listed in how many times they've been downloaded. Meaning most popular to least popular. But I can also do it by date, so I can do date posted descending. So likely these are more of the preprints and so I'm looking for articles that I might not have found in HeinOnline that haven't been published yet. The final place is Google Scholar. And this is especially important in all of your research, not just in your preemption check, but if you are doing something that crosses you know, if you're looking at social justice, things that might be outside just the legal topic area, and Google Scholar works like all of the other things we've been seeing but it pulls from just about all articles you've seen. And so it will pull legal articles from HUD online, but also from all of the databases that you might find. And so here is what it looks like. My tip about Google Scholar is make sure you're signed in as your L Clarke self and then it will help you know what is available through through Lewis and Clark. And so while these might be available just as PDFs, but they're also available to Lewis and Clark students. So here are my here are my articles and I can look through and see has my idea yet been written. Remember, you can also sort over here eventually when you get to further in your research and then look at key cases statutes and regulations. So preemption is really important. You want to make sure your paper hasn't been written but also know that if you find a paper that's not the end of the world, you're going to use that paper to get more information, use the use the things that are cited with that in it to find additional articles on it. And also, you know, find that little that little nugget that you want to write on that maybe this paper hasn't gone into yet. So the best research sources and strategies the first thing is you're going to break your research into two parts, a background research and a focused research. Now these overlap a little because you know, you're doing background research and then you get really into one subject and you start doing more focused research. That's fine. There's no you know, oh, I've done all of these steps. There's no checklists specifically to this. But in general, getting background information allows you to then focus your research further with more specific terms, better ideas, better ideas of where your paper is going. Things you need to focus on after you've started writing and need to come back to your research. So background research, you're going to go oftentimes to research guides so that you can get a broad overview of a subject you're going to find relevant resources for your focused research. Now a research guide. You can find a research guide on a topic of law by going to Google and typing in your topic of law. Let's go with maritime law. And we'll just do legal research guide. And here we have an introductory sources to maritime law research guide. And then we have University of Maine. We're looking at maritime law, you know, you can even kind of think about what are the more likely law schools to have a maritime law program. So Maine seems like a pretty good bet since it's covered by coast that they probably have a pretty good maritime law department there. So I'll go to Georgetown and we'll just look and see what we have. We have some introductory resources, because it's possible you've picked this subject, but you don't know a lot about the general area. of law. So you can read a nutshell or something that will get you up to speed quickly on the area of law. You can see what primary resources there are kind of what cases what statutes, what regulations am I likely to need to look through and then secondary sources. So these are the main treatises on your area of law. And so you're going to be able to look into those overarching things that will help you create a background to your paper. You're going to look at books and articles as you read. Don't forget to track your research log but these help with background information. Getting to the point in the issues, and then we'll help you find additional citations to relevant materials for your focused research. Remember, as they write their book, they're footnoting it and all of those kinds of things. So how do we find books in our library? We're going to go to Boolean Law Library, and this is our catalog right here. So you can get to our catalog. So this catalog search allows you to look for books, databases, anything like that. The E resources only look specifically for digital things that we have available. And then we have an articles in journals tab, which allows us to look at just do we even own this journal, or looking specifically for an article so it is already filtering that information for you. So let's go ahead and go to our catalog search. We're going to take civil procedure out of that and look and see what we find. So these are books on piracy, maritime law and universal jurisdiction. And so we get a print book on that it looks like it is available in the Bali Bali Law Library. We can scroll down if there if you're looking at something that isn't just a legal topic, maybe there's some philosophy in it. You might find that Watson might have that book also. And you can just walk up to Watson and check it out there or you can have it delivered to a bully and just pick it up downstairs in the circulation desk. It's downstairs for me I'm upstairs in Woodhall right now. So, right now I'm looking at piracy in a legal context and prosecution of pirates operate operating off the Somali coast. There's a lot of information I can get from it. First of all, I can just pull this book from the shelf, go to kz seven to 12 dot m 53 2011. Pull it from the shelf, look at it, see if it's okay, if it's something I'm interested in, and then I can check it out and you check it out for 12 weeks now. And so you can have it for almost the length of it. Well, you won't have to think about it again until after exams when you can bring it back and return it after you're done with your paper. You can see that it's available. We have one copy and one copy available. If it's not available, you'll see that there might be a summit library that owns this item. And you can request it and that means it'll take about a week for it to get here. Then you'll get an email from the library saying hey, your book is in if we don't have it available at all, you can then interlibrary loan it and that usually takes maybe a little longer up to two weeks to come in. But we can get almost any book for you throughout the the entire world. This also works for articles if we don't have the article available, but the best thing about it is usually they'll come to us digitally and we can get those within hours of requesting. So the other information that I can see when I look for something on a catalog. So here is information, the title and everything but the subjects those are really helpful because this is going to show me all the other books and articles that have been have been given this subject so maybe I'm interested in piracy or hijacking of ships, piracy and Somalia, the Gulf of Aden, but I can go to that and I'll go to that subject area and it will show me all of the materials that have that same subject heading. So here's contemporary piracy and maritime terrorism. And then I can look and see, you know, are these more specific maybe there's something that is more specific that I'm interested in the Law of the Sea criminal provisions, maybe that I can continue to refine my search. The other thing I can do instead of going and standing in front of the books, but that is a lot of fun. You can also virtually browse the shelf. And all of these books are the books that are surrounding your book on the shelf and it goes for several slides and the best thing about the Library of Congress, they're all grouped in a specific area of law. So if there's one this looks like I'm on terrorism. If there's one area, you're in this specific area of law, you can look left and right and see if there are other books in that specific area. That you want to look at. So lots of things you can do with the catalog to find additional books that are helping you with your background. A book is a great place for background and they're going to lead you with their footnotes or endnotes, to more pointed primary or really pointed secondary sources that will help you find those focused that focused research that you need. We just went through all of these things. So this is books that using primo WorldCat is when you would then make an interlibrary loan request you can make an interlibrary loan request under borrowing interlibrary loan and then there is a form right here. Give us as much information as you have about the book and we will help you find it.
So again, in background research, we just talked about how to find articles using Lexus or Westlaw you can go to the secondary sources or secondary materials, law reviews and journals. But again, I still recommend HeinOnline you're looking for those background research papers. We looked at SSRN and digital comments and Google Scholar offer those kinds of things. And then remember now that you're in your background research, instead of looking specifically at looking at preemption, use those tools like let's see here's lose the tools like your filters for date to kind of narrow your topic so that you can come back to your research. So if I want to look at all of the all of the articles since 2023, because I have 45 minutes that I can work on. That's a really great way to do it. If I type this in and only have 45 minutes and I haven't filtered it by anything. Then recreating that search and knowing that I've already checked all of these things is harder to do. And so oftentimes I will do a custom range, you know, 2023 to 2023 2022 to 2023, that kind of custom range to filter it so that I'm looking at only the things that I want to look at for that. And then finally, we have a couple of helpful legal research guides, just like the finding the finding and researching your paper topic guide that I showed you at the beginning. So let's go ahead and go back to Bali. We go to that research tab and our research guides. And the first one that you might find helpful while looking for background information is this articles for legal and non legal research. This helps you find all of the article all the places that we have articles, all the resources for where we have articles, you'll see Google Scholar on paywall Open Access button. And all of those are through Primo. You can find articles through premium, the Law Journal library through HeinOnline legal track again is that subject based indexing, and then we have non legal journal sources. And so you might find Oh, this is in JSTOR. I've looked in looked in Google Scholar it says it's in JSTOR. You can come here this is our access to JSTOR. And then you also find the press this preprints let's see legal scholarship network which is the SSRN republishing and then you also see some newspaper resources. Speaking of newspaper resources, you might find that you're looking for something in the news. We haven't used Research Guide, and that will help you find multiple newspapers at the same time. Or under this individual publication tab. You can look specifically at things like the Oregonian or the New York Times or historical New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. So if you're looking for a specific article, or you know that this is a newsworthy article, what all had they been talking about? Come to one of our news research tabs and then look for it through that. Then we move into focused research. So focus research does all of the things the background research is has led you to so you do all the background research. It points you to special specialized things that you need to know some of the things that you can do our consultations with people in librarians, librarians or people too but other people then librarians, we have specialized materials in your area of law, primary legal materials, you're moving towards primary legal materials. You're going to update your cases and regulations, your administrative decisions in your legislation, and then any non legal materials that you might find so talking to the experts with consultations, you might have a faculty advisor that is helping you with your paper, but you might also know that there are faculty that are specifically have specific knowledge in your area of law, make an appointment with them, go and talk to the experts talk to an expert in a lawyer that is practicing either in Portland or some other area. Reach out to them say you're a law student and you're writing your paper on this area of law. What have you found those kinds of things? It's fantastic and a lot of people really want to help students with their papers and things like that. So you'll find a lot of a lot of help in this area. Librarians make an appointment with us. You can go to this make an appointment app, and you'll see when we're available and if you can't find something that works with your time schedule, send us an email at law lib at l clark.edu. And we'll be happy to find a time that works for you. What happens when you meet with a librarian. We will pull resources for you that are specific to your area of law specific to the research you're doing. So let us know as much as you can about what you're doing what your topic is. But feel free to book an appointment with us if you're still struggling with finding that that topic that really resonates for you. And then use research guides. We have our own you I just showed them to you. There are many others just use your search your area of law, your jurisdiction, whatever it is you're looking for, and the terms Legal Research Guide. Looking for specialized material, those leading treatises that we found on those research guides, specialized databases, either at law practice centers, or, or specialized databases that I'm going to show you in a second. And then Research Guides. Again, research guides Research Guides research guides. So let's see how do we look for specialized databases, our research A to Z, you can look through this and say I have no idea if this is an Agricola or not. There are a lot of ways to kind of look through first of all I can look through the subjects and I can say show me all the environmental law databases that we have a lot about good Best Bets but these are all of the databases that might help you find specialized information. Maybe you're doing something about mining or mineral law. You we have the Rocky Mountain mineral Law Foundation digital library, so that might help you find those very specific resources that will help you focus your research. Another way to do this same type of search is to go to our homepage and use this guides and databases and then I can type in environmental law. And this search is all a bully's website for the term environmental law. So I find all of the research guides to talk about environmental law. Then I find all of the things in the A to Z database, any blog posts we've written about environmental law and then any Frequently Asked Questions somebody asks about environmental law, we'll all be found in those things. So again, we find those research guides and there's a to z databases, which will help us focus our research
and then you get to cases statutes and legislation, regulations, agency reports and documents and legislative history. This seems more like the legal research you're probably used to. How do I look at cases? How do I make sure they're updated? I'm using the yellow flags, the red flags, those kinds of things, making sure you're looking at cases that have cited it, look to all of the briefs and documents that are there. You can also look to dockets. So if the case doesn't have looking, if you look for something that might not have a judicial opinion written, you can still search our docket databases, which are found either in Bloomberg and dockets or in Lexis through Port links. You can find dockets there, and they draw from pacer so if you say Oh, I know it's in Pacer, then it will also be in Bloomberg or port links on Lexis. The nice thing about court links on Lexis it's it's my newest favorite on dockets, because you can modify your search in Bloomberg, you can't modify your search M. And also, they have Lexus has more state courts doesn't have all of them because not all of them are. They're all on very different systems, but it has a lot more than the other, the other databases. The one thing I'm going to say about regulations is remember that the Federal Register is going to have a whole lot of information on why the agency decided to go with this regulation. It's going to have comments. It's going to have links to the various the actual comments that are made. So if you're doing something that is agency related or regulatory related the Code of Federal Regulations, check out the federal register for it. It will be at the bottom of the regulation. You can find the Federal Register the Federal Register citation there, check it out and read about it because you're going to find that very direct information from Why did the agency decide on this and you might get some very focused very good information from that. legislative history is one of the harder things to find and I highly recommend asking a librarian to help you out if you want to, but there you will find guides. That's let's see. Where's my guide? Nope. All right. Well try it this way. Sorry about that. I tried to keep tabs open, but I don't always so if I'm in my research guides, you will find that there are research guides on Oregon legislative history, and then we have a federal legislative history. So these will take you through step by step on how to find legislative history for your state or on the federal level. So if you're doing Oregon legislative history, it takes you again through step one to you know, Bill's post 2007 pre 2007 and how to do that. Every state has something like this and you do it just the same way you'd find a regular legal research guide you'd say, you know, Minnesota legislative history legal research guide, and you'll usually find something that is done by a.edu some law school has developed something that will take you through the steps or you might find that the legislature has done the same thing. And then don't forget, you need to update your cases in your regulations, your administrator dishes decisions in your legislation. So you shepherds use Keysight and use them both. Because you want to make sure that you aren't falling falling you know what shepherds will say this is a red flag and Westlaw will say it's a yellow flag and you need to check them both to make sure that you are you are citing all of the cases you understand why it might not be good law or what's coming up. So it's also a good time to if you're decide to use a case, flag it say you know I want to keep current on this and make sure you are you know if it is coming up for a new decision. And then non legal materials. One of the big things that really helped papers are things like statistics, and so you can look for non legal materials, and we happen to have we go to this search we can get rid of this and we can look at statistics and we'll find the the A to Z databases on statistics and the research guides on statistics. And so this is where to find statistics in just general reference materials. But here we have, you know, criminal victimization in the United States data.gov Easy access to juvenile court statistics from 85 to 2011, FBI crime statistics, so statistics that might help in your research to find those kinds of things. So statistics are are usually a pretty good non legal material that we help you find. Keeping Current and so this is one of the things that we talked about, you know, in that, you know, how do I even find a paper topic, you're going to use those same ideas to create alerts and newsletters. So just like we set that up in Lexis 360, or in any daily or climate wire or any of those things, after you've decided on your topic. Set a newsletter alert and make sure that you're staying up to date on it. The other thing and we didn't let's see if I have something you can we'll go to go to Westlaw. Let's see what I was last researching and Westlaw and we can see if we can
looks like I was looking at piercing the corporate veil
and what we'll do is once we find a case, we can go to this case
and we get all of these things and you'll see this little bell right here so I can create a key site alert and that will tell me anytime the key sites or the anytime this anytime this something happens to this case, I will be alerted by Westlaw or Lexus and so after I've decided on the cases I'm looking for, I might set up an alert to make sure it is you know, I know if anything's happening to this as it goes through. It's especially helpful if your research is going on for a year or you're doing a two semester long paper. So tracking and managing your data track as you go. Keeping track of your research as you go will help you organize, think of your paper structurally and minimize the amount of time you spend backtracking through your good resources. I know all of us have saved cases and then had to reread those cases multiple times because we haven't done a good job of saying what it is what I like about this how I'm going to use it in my paper. So make sure you're doing that as you go. So how can I do that? And I I would say the best way to track your resources is the way that you're going to whatever works for you is the best way for you to do it. Whatever is going to make you do it. That's the best way to do it. And one of those things that we have available as far as online services is power notes. So you can use your at l clarke.edu. Email to sign up and it allows you to do as many papers as you want. And we're going to we have time, so we're going to watch the demo on it because I think they do a better job of explaining what power notes does. But basically, you highlight what you want to keep from something and then it saves that information. So let's go ahead and watch that. There it is. It's a demonstration we'll watch about four or five minutes of it. Now
on to research. Once you're on a page or PDF where you want to capture something, just highlight the relevant text. A pop up will appear prompting you to categorize the highlight. This pop up has a few features in addition to the default topics we started you off with in the bottom left corner is the copy button, which copies what you've highlighted to your clipboard. using Ctrl or Command C will also copy to clipboard. Next is the Add Topic button, which lets you quickly add a new topic to your project. Finally, there is an edit topics button which will bring up a menu that lets you change topic names, delete topics, edit the order of your topics, and change topic colors. The default in power notes is to highlight a minimum of two words. If you want to override the setting, just hold down the Ctrl or Command key while you highlight and we will grab exactly what you select such as a single word or partial word. Once you have selected a topic, you will be given the option to take notes on your highlight. There are a couple of features in the notes box. You can delete the highlight using the trashcan icon or copy the highlight to the clipboard using the copy icon. You can also review the citation information for the highlight. We'll talk about citation some more in a minute. To save your notes just click on the checkmark hit enter or just click off the notes box. Power notes is customized to work on almost all legal databases, including Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and Heine online. When you are in a legal database, just highlight the content you want to save, then categorize and annotated and power notes will automatically save a link back to the source and the citation provided by the database. Note that the citations provided by the databases may not be in blue book format, so we allow you to edit the citation. We have also preserved the databases native copy with citation function, which can be found in the lower left of the pop up box. Instead of our standard copy button. The sidebar is where you can see your highlights and notes, all organized by topic. Here you can change topic names, edit your notes and get back to your sources by clicking on the links that we save in the background. You can also add notes to a topic without making a highlight. Just click on the plus icon to the right of the topic name. This creates a blank note card. You can also shrink the sidebar by sliding over it or minimize it to an icon that you can move around the screen. And remember, you can also disable power notes through the extension tray. If you come across a page or PDF where power notes doesn't work properly, just click on the pink Feedback button in the sidebar. This will bring up a screen with the URL pre populated so that you can easily report the problem for us to investigate. If the sidebar does not appear, you can send us feedback through the power notes menu in the browsers extension tray. Other sidebar features include the project manager where you can switch between projects and create new ones. A View selector where you can filter what shows up in the sidebar and a link to this project outline page. The project outline contains all of the material you captured during the research process. Here you can edit your project name and description, change topic names, edit your notes, and click on the links to go back to the source. More importantly, here's where you can assess and reorganize your research. You can do this by dragging and dropping your note cards around or using the menu attached to each card. You can also delete cards. To limit what you see on your screen. Use the filters to the right click on the plus icons to incorporate additional notes into your outline click on the Manage topics link to reorder entire sections of your outline. Here you can add and delete topics, Edit Topic names, and change topic colors. When you have done enough research you can also add your paper headings and subheadings to the topic list. You can then move each piece of research from your initial outline into an outline with a different structure. This technique puts you in a better position to start your first draft. When you are ready to write. You can download your outline to a document that you can open with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You can also download your content to Excel files that can help you visualize and synthesize your research. In addition, you can download all your sources into an RS file that you can import into most citation generation tools. Note that only citation information that you have checked and saved to sources the ones with the green quote icons will be included in these downloads.
So that's power notes. And if you don't have a system that you already like, I highly recommend power notes because it allows you to save things from you know from Westlaw from Lexus from Hyde online all at the same time. And so you're not having a folder here and a folder there and trying to mix them all. So you can use that you can sign up can use those five quick steps to get started. You can rewatch that video to see how all you're going to use it. But there are also those built in legal research tools that Westlaw and Lexus and Bloomberg have that you can save within a folder. And then we also have some freemium models of Evernote OneNote in jurist M that you can grab however, they're very similar to not similar power notes I think is better functionally, but power notes has so many more things and the Law School has purchased our copy of power notes and so you can make as many as you want. But it's okay to be low tech. I mean if you want to handwrite everything and use posts or index cards you can do that Whatever helps you but using an Excel Excel or Word spreadsheet, just tracking everything. I recommend having it open as you do your research so you can just throw the things in and then oftentimes placing it I happen to be a color coder so I will color code my different sections and then throw it in so that I know this goes in this section that goes in that section. The best management tool is the one you'll use consistently so find something that you like and use it consistently. And then finally, what to do if you're stuck, talk to a librarian make an appointment, sometimes just talking it out, finding more resources gets you that start that you know helps you get unstuck. Talk to your professor, clarify your concepts, talk that out with them. Maybe they see it going a different direction. And that's what's that has you stuck. brainstorm different terms, different paths, find a good research guide, take a break go outside, at least for a little while. It's not going to be raining so you'll be able to go take a break and then be kind to yourself. It's pretty normal to get angry or sad or forlorn. But you don't have to stay there. You can find any of these things. One of the things that I think is a great way to get unstuck is to find somebody that hasn't had to hear about your paper and talk to them. Their questions will get you excited about your topic again, and you'll be ready to start your research back up again. So if you are doing this for individual research credit, you need to either use this QR code or I will let's see if I can I hate to do this because it's going to throw me somewhere else but I'll go back to that QR code for everybody. That just had their phones up to do that. I'm going to put this in chat. So here's the link to that. If you are doing an individual research paper, you do need to have credit for this class and I will turn that into Dean Davis. After you've done you just sign it I think it asks you a couple of questions about the class, something that you learned as we talked through this. Everyone good on using the QR code. All right, excellent. So are there any questions and so again, you can email me you can email the library at law live at l clarke.edu. And then we also have that finding and researching your paper guide that will help you get through all of these things. So I'm going to stop sharing and I will ask if there any questions.
I don't hear any questions right now but please feel free to reach out if you have additional questions or if you start your research and say, I'm not sure where to go next. Feel free to reach out for that again this. This recording will be available on that workshop page, along with the slides and along with an AI transcript. I hope to see some of you tomorrow. At the tech GPT talk we'll see you
