Research in Scholarly Journals
Use the following methods to locate and read journal articles:
Use the Legal Trac index to locate the broadest array of publications. Note that because this is an index it has citation information, not complete articles. The Kluwer Law International serves as an index to the Kluwer Law International publications. To obtain full-text, look in our print collection. If you don't find the item at Pitt, we will obtain it through Interlibrary Loan. (More ILL information below).
Look in all of these:
- Oxford Journals Online - good variety of international law articles with European perspective.
- Cambridge Electronic Journals - wide assortment of high quality international law articles.
- Ingenta Connect - lots of European law and human rights journals including Brill publications.
- Ethnic News Watch - news plus scholarly writing about ethnic groups' legal issues.
- Hein Online - PDF versions of hundreds of U.S. and foreign law journals.
- SpringerLink - PDF versions of articles and chapters from Europe, published by Springer.
- Lexis - full-text of journals published by law schools and the Lexis family of publishers.
- Westlaw - full-text of journals published by law schools and the West family of publishers.
Because all of these are full-text databases, they only include articles that they are licensed to reproduce and they do not index articles unless they have the full text in their databases.
Note that scholarly commentary from public policy think tanks is often useful in legal research.
If you already know of a journal title, or want to browse for title names, look through the e-journals list (university library subscriptions) or PittCat (includes e-journals only available through the law library). Also, browse around the print journal collection on the fifth floor. The journals are shelved in alphabetical order by title.
Two major international libraries, the UN's Peace Palace Library and the European Commission's Library, list individual journal articles in their catalogs. Search by key words or author names in both of those catalogs.
If you are trying to find the full text of an article that you already know about, but haven't found it in this list of steps, order a copy of the article via interlibrary loan (ILL). You will need to complete an ILL request form at the Circulation Desk. If the library providing the photocopy of your article charges us a fee for the copies or postage, we will pass that charge along to you.
If any of these resources ask you for a user name and password, log-in to https://sremote.pitt.edu with your Pitt user name and password and look for the source in the University's database list. If you still can't get in, you will have to access it from a computer inside the law school building.
