Legal Research

Refined Searches in Google Scholar

By Simon Fodden

If you use Google Scholar at all, you may be pleased to know that it’s now possible to refine certain searches. In a particular kind of search you want to know how a judgment or article has been received: this you can get by clicking on the “cited by [n]” link that will appear beneath each item in your search results. The happy ability to refine comes from Google’s addition of a switch to let you search within the articles or judgments that cited your initial work. Thus, to use a pedestrian example, Google Scholar returns 789 results for a search for [Drybones], first among these being R. v. Drybones 1970 SCR 282. This judgment has been cited by 231 other judgments and articles indexed on Google Scholar.

To refine these results, I searched for the term [charter] within them, producing 165 results.

Not an earthshaking development, perhaps, but welcome even so.

[hat tip @jacobglick]

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 06, 2010 (boomark / email).