Legal Research

This week, HeinOnline announced a beta "faceted search" option for its Law Journal Library.  "Faceted search" is just a fancy way of saying that, if you choose this search option, HeinOnline will cluster your law review search results into different categories on the screen, displaying the number of articles that are within a certain date range, from a particular law review, about a particular subject, or articles that fall within a particular document type (book review, student note, etc.).

Why run a faceted search?  To browse search results faster, of course!  Let's say that you're working as a research assistant for a professor, and they want articles on a particular topic, but they don't want to see any student notes or comments.  Faceted searching lets you weed out these kinds of documents really quickly.  Or if you want to see the most recent articles on a topic, faceted searching gives you a nice snapshot of which articles were published between specific date ranges, like 2006 to present.

To see faceted search in action, run either a "Field" search or an "Advanced" search in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library (faceted searching isn't available in other HeinOnline libraries yet).  When you get your search results, click on the link, "Run as Faceted Search - BETA," at the top of the screen, and HeinOnline will reformat the search results into the categories shown below:

I ran a search in the Law Journal Library for law review materials that contain the phrase "battered woman syndrome" in the title.  Here's what the faceted search results look like:

If you have questions about how to use HeinOnline, contact one of the reference librarians or visit the HeinOnline blog, which has tons of great searching tips.