UMKC Leon E. Bloch Law Library

Find Articles on a Legal Topic
- LegalTrac
  - Description: Accessible only in the law building. LegalTrac provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,400 titles including major law reviews, legal newspapers, bar association journals and international legal journals. LegalTrac also contains law-related articles from over 1,000 additional business and general interest titles. In some cases, full text of the article is available as well as the abstract. Database covers from August 1980 to the present.
- Legal Periodical Indexes (via Westlaw)
  - Description: Access to three major indexes: Index to Canadian Legal Literature (coverage beginning in 1985), Index to Legal Periodicals (beginning in 1981), and Legal Resource Index (beginning in 1980), an electronic companion to the Current Law Index.
- Legal Periodicals Indexes (via Lexis)
  - Description: Access to three periodical index databases: Index to Legal Periodicals (beginning in 1978), Legal Resource Index (beginning in 1977), Martin-Hubbell Legal Articles (beginning in 2004).
  - As an alternative to searching abstract databases, consider doing a "summary segment" search in a journals database on Lexis. Tutorial: Segment Searching on Lexis.
- SSRN eLibrary Database Search
  - Description: Search titles, abstracts and keywords of published and unpublished papers written by legal scholars. Almost 250,000 abstracts are loaded into the database with about 200,000 full text documents. Link to "Top 10 Papers". Link to UMKC Faculty Papers (account required).
- BePress Legal Repository
  - Description: Search titles, subjects, keywords, and full text for published and unpublished papers written by legal scholars. Contains about 3,000 articles. You may also browse by subject .
Find Articles on an Interdisciplinary Topic
- Academic Search Elite (EBSCO)
  - Description: Multidisciplinary database indexing 8,000 + journals (4,400 + with full articles). Majority are peer-reviewed. Includes educational reports and book reviews. Database covers from 1975 to present for abstracts with some full text material back until 1922.
- JSTOR Archives
  - Description: Contains fully searchable scanned (PDF) articles from selected journals in a broad range of disciplines, including African-American studies, art, ecology, economics, education, history, law (57 titles), literature, music, general science, sociology, and statistics. (To see a complete list of disciplines and journal titles, link to the JSTOR browse list.)
- Google Scholar
  - Description: If you are going to use Google for your research, use Google Scholar. Per Google, "From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations."
Find a Journal or Get an Article in Full-Text
- Hein Online Law Journal Library
  - Description: Contains more than 1,200 law and law-related periodicals. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals and goes through the most-currently published issues allowed based on contracts with publishers. Therefore, in some cases the current issues are available, but generally a user will notice a one-volume delay. Searching can be done by title or author name, as well as full-text searching of the collection or select periodicals. Date ranges may also be entered to narrow search results. Sub-collections of the Law Journal Library are also available for those institutions wishing to subscribe to fewer periodicals. Download list of titles.
- Journals with Individual Online Subscriptions
  - Description: The law library subscribes to several individual journals online: Issues in Legal Scholarship; The Journal of Law & Economics; The Journal of Legal Studies; and Theoretical Inquiries in Law
- Serials Solutions
  - Description: This services helps you find which database has the journal for which you are looking. It lists full-text journals, magazines and newspapers available through many of the databases to which the UMKC University Libraries subscribe. It also includes some journals to which the Libraries has individual subscriptions as well as many journals which are free on the Web. Listings include the journal title, links to the database or databases providing full text, and coverage.

Why should I use an abstract service?

Image of Google Scholar on a t-ter-totter with LegalTrac

Free or full-text searches (Google Scholar or Hein Online) often yield too many "hits." To get more precise and fewer hits, use a database that permits searching by abstracts, keywords or summaries, such as LegalTrac, SSRN, BePress or Academic Search Elite. Lexis and Westlaw offer both kinds of searching, through abstract databases and field (segment) searching. Tutorial: Segment Searching on Lexis.