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Pritzker Legal Research Center


Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) Research Guide

This guide supports the research needs of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC)

Finding Articles in NUsearch

You can use NUsearch to locate articles in traditional law journals, scholarly journals from other disciplines and newspapers.

 If you are looking for a specific article, you can use the Advanced Search screen to search within Title or Author fields.  Note that Title = title of article.  There is a separate field for Journal Title. 

You can also do a basic keyword search for articles.   NUsearch assumes that you are searching for all the words you type unless OR or NOT are specified between the words and phrases.  To use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) within search phrases, you must enter them in uppercase letters.  To search for a phrase, type quotation marks around the phrase.

Use the filters to narrow to peer-reviewed journals, to limit by subject heading or to filter by date.

Finding law articles in other databases

LexisAdvance and Westlaw both contain law review articles in their secondary source collections.  Coverage of journals in Lexis and Westlaw varies. 

HeinOnline includes full-text access to over 1000 law journals, with coverage going back to the first volume for most journals.

Northwestern also subscribes to LegalTrac and Index to Legal Periodicals, specialty legal periodical databases. These databases contain citations with abstracts, but not always full-text of the articles, from over 800 journals.  The advantage of using an article index like LegalTrac or Index to Legal Periodicals is that they allow for subject heading searches.

A free alternative for law review articles is Google Scholar, a separate scholarly search service from Google available at Scholar.Google.com.

Finding non-law article databases

Northwestern University subscribes to a number of non-legal article databases.  Use the NU Library A-Z Database Guide to find a the best database for your research.  You can search databases by subject and by database type such as Article Index.  The guide also includes recommendations for the best databases on a given subject.