Legal research
Legal research
- Legal Research Skills - An Australian Law GuideA number of Australian law school libraries have worked together to create an open access book on legal research skills.
- A Guide to Writing in Law SchoolThis book aims to help students improve their legal writing, containing general chapters on planning, clear writing, and acknowledging your sources, as well as chapters on specialised types of writing required of law students.
La Trobe Law School Students have access to a suite of legal research training modules via your course noticeboards.
Additional tools
Tools to help you plan and track your research:
- Assessment PlannerThe Assessment Planner can help you plan your preparation, research and writing time. It also provides helpful links to library learning hub resources to assist you with your assessment.
- Research Strategy templateThis is an example of a research strategy form, but you can use any format to capture the same information.
- Search Operator "Cheat Sheet"Outlines which search operators to use across a variety of common domestic and international-based databases and search engines.
The Finding Information section of Achieve@Uni contains helpful information and videos for searching for resources. Look particularly at the Search Tips page.
Scholarly Sources
How can you tell if a source is “academic”, “scholarly” or “peer reviewed”? The video below will assist you.
- UlrichswebThis database provides information on whether a publication is academic/scholarly, peer reviewed (also known as “refereed”) or a trade publication.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar contains many legal journal articles and other documents. It can be useful resource for finding journal articles from foreign countries and also international journal articles.
- Google Advanced SearchGoogle Advanced Search allows you to limit your search by domain (ie .gov.au) or use more sophisticated search strategies than the standard Google search.