13 Steps of Successful Academic Legal Research

Writing a paper this semester?  For a clear and helpful explanation of the academic paper writing process, see Agustin Parise, The 13 Steps of Successful Academic Legal Research, 38 Int’l J. of Legal Info. 1.  The article starts off with a discussion of teamwork, ie. who can help you with your paper.   Your research team consists of  colleagues, advisors and mentors, the library staff and people who have written on the same topic.  The article then discusses the 5 components for successful academic research, followed by the 13 steps.   One of the steps deals with international and comparative law materials, but the rest can be applied to any type of academic legal research.

I would add three more hints to the article:

1.  Besides looking in the library catalog, try the Ohiolink catalog to find materials you can order via Ohiolink.  Materials from Ohiolink take three to seven days to arrive at the law library.  You may also try WorldCat for materials available via Interlibrary Loan.

2.  For organizing your research and creating a working bibliography, try reference management software such as RefWorks or Zotero . This software enables you to make a database of citation references with notes, documents, and Web pages attached to each reference; create footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies; and insert properly formatted citations into documents while you are writing them.

3.  Take a look at the library’s Scholarly Writing Resource Guide and attend some of our upcoming research certificate seminars dealing with scholarly writing, paper topic selection and using Zotero.

Photo: by Ed Yourdon