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Canadian Legal Research Manual

This reference work was created by the Lederman Law Library to support Queen’s students learning legal research skills.

Exploratory Research Stage

Exploratory Research is a highly variable Stage, depending on your level of expertise.

Novice researchers often mistakenly skip exploratory research and go straight to in-depth searching, which leaves them without important context for navigating primary sources of law.

In this Stage:

  1. Reflect on Your Knowledge
  2. Brainstorm Preliminary Keywords
  3. Locate Introductory Resources
  4. Determine Next Steps

1. Reflect on Your Knowledge

Even an experienced lawyer may need to conduct some exploratory research if they are dealing with an area of law that they don't deal with on a daily basis.

Reflect on the following:

  • How familiar am I with this broad area of law? this specific legal topic?
  • What gaps in my knowledge do I need to fill in before I can start more in-depth research?
  • Are there legal concepts or issues that I need to understand first?
  • Do I have advice or guidance from a professor, lawyer, or other supervisor on starting points for my research topic?

2. Brainstorm Preliminary Keywords

One goal of exploratory research is to develop a list of preliminary keywords for searching.

Use the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary categories to brainstorm keywords.

Depending on your level of knowledge, you will likely not have keywords for each category at this stage in your research. These are preliminary keywords; they are meant to help you locate introductory resources where you will find more terms and phrases to add to your list. Revisit this list often to refine and revise your keywords as you learn more about the topic.

►See "Extracting Keywords" in Christa Bracci & Erica Friesen, Legal Research Online (eCampus Ontario Open Library, 2024) for more information. 

3. Locate Introductory Resources

Next, use your preliminary keywords to locate introductory secondary sources like legal encyclopedias, textbooks, and treatises. These resources lay out the basic principles of an area of law and highlight relevant legislation and leading case law.

Primary keywords are especially useful for identifying introductory sources because it is often not possible to search across the entire text of the source. For example, if you are researching automatism, you will want to use the primary keywords criminal law and criminal defences instead of the secondary keyword automatism. Once you've identified a resource that covers that area of law, you can then search or scan for your secondary and tertiary keywords. 

►See our chapter on Secondary Sources to learn how to find specific types of sources.

4. Determine Next Steps

The introductory resources you've now located are especially useful for citation tracing. The experts who write these resources have already identified the leading case law and applicable legislation for you—all you have to do is follow those citations.

This is much more efficient than conducting your own searches across the millions of documents in Westlaw, Lexis, or CanLII. You can then use these citations as a jumping off point into more in-depth research, depending on which source type(s) they have pointed you towards.

At this point you may also find it helpful to consult a Law Librarian, who can guide you towards relevant databases, resources, and search strategies for your topic.

Not sure what to do? When in doubt, proceed to in-depth secondary source research. It never hurts to have a better understanding of a topic before you dive into case law research.

Stages in Legal Research

The exploratory research stage includes the following steps: reflect on your knowledge, brainstorm preliminary keywords, locate introductory resources, and determine next steps.

The 6 stages are depicted in order: topic definition feeds into exploratory research, which then leads into the three concurrent stages of in-depth secondary sources, legislation, and case law research. The last stage is to finalize research.