Bluebook Rule 16 covers citations to articles. A typical article citation follows the following format:
Author's name, Title of Article, Journal Volume #, Abbreviation of Journal, Page on which article begins, span of specific pages being cited, date of publication.
HeinOnline's Law Journal Library contains the most complete coverage of law-related periodicals in PDF format. It contains complete runs of titles - from the first issue published through the most-currently published issues for most journals.
If you are not on campus, connect to the VPN or select Northwestern from the drop-down menu after running your search.
Tip 1: If you can't find the article by copying & pasting the citation, try browsing for the journal title in the Hein Law Journal Library and then narrow by volume and page number.
Tip 2: If you're having trouble deciphering an abbreviation in a journal citation, you can try looking it up in the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. It will give you the name of the publication, and it's easier to use than the Bluebook tables.
To find an article published in a non-legal journal, use Northwestern's Journal Search tool. You can also access the tool using the Find a Journal button on the homepage of the library's website. This tool will let you see if we have access to the title in any of our databases. Note that one journal may be available in multiple databases and that the dates of coverage may vary between databases.
Students may also be interested in trying two new browser extensions which aim to help researchers gain free access to copies of articles by searching open access repositories.
Not all databases will provide PDFs copies of the articles. Some databases will provide the article in an html format and it is not generally easy to tell from the links what the format will be.
Examples of databases that do include PDFs are:
If an article is available only in print through any of Northwestern's campus libraries, (e.g., Law Library, Main Library, etc.), place a scan request in NUsearch.
Library staff will scan the relevant pages from the print journal volume and save them to a shared OneDrive folder for your journal.
If Northwestern does not have access to the article and if you cannot find excerpts of the relevant pages through non-NU alternatives, request the article through Interlibrary Loan. See the Interlibrary Loan page for details on placing requests.
