Skip to Main Content
QUL logo

Canadian Legal Research Manual

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

Journal Literature

Law journals are a rich source of scholarly writing. Specialized topics that are too narrow for publication as books are typically published in law journals. Some law journals are published commercially, but many are produced by law schools.

Law journal articles can be found in various ways, described below. Law journal articles require highly specialized access points and are difficult to find through a Google search.

Note: Several terms are used in relation to law journals:

  • Periodical refers to any publication that is published at regular ("periodical") intervals (e.g. annual, quarterly). Journals are periodicals, but so are newspapers and magazines. 
  • Legal literature is a broader term that typically includes other secondary sources such as treatises and other types of books.

Find a Known Article

One common legal research task is to track down an article from a citation.

Let's say you were looking for the article from the following citation: Kathryn McKague & Effie Lin, "Why Would I Ever Plead Spoliation?" (2023) 54:1 Adv Q 93.

To track down this article, you will need to be able to decode the following two pieces of the citation:

  1. The article title, usually in quotation marks (here it is "Why Would I Ever Plead Spoliation?").
  2. The journal title, usually abbreviated, which refers to the broader publication that the article is published in (here it is the Advocate's Quarterly, which has been abbreviated to Adv Q).

 

Use the following steps to find this article:

Find Articles on a Topic

If you are starting your article research from scratch, you may need to use keyword searches to find journal articles on a particular topic.

This section describes several access points for finding law journal articles available via the Queen's Library: Omni, full-text article databases, and legal literature indexes.

Tips: Using the Index to Canadian Legal Literature

The Index to Canadian Legal Literature (ICLL) is the only comprehensive index to Canadian journal articles, books, conference proceedings, collections of essays, and book reviews in the field of law and law-related topics.

Use the dropdowns below to learn how to use the ICLL on Westlaw. 

Literature from Other Disciplines

Scholars from disciplines outside of law (e.g. Sociology, Business, Political Studies) sometimes publish research on topics that have legal dimensions and may be helpful to your research project.

To locate literature from other disciplines, you need to move beyond law-specific indexes and databases. A great place to start is Omni since it provides access to journal articles and other resources across all academic disciplines.

►See Omni Search Tips to learn more about how to effectively search Omni. 

For a more targeted search of journal articles from a specific discipline, consult journal indexes and databases from that discipline.

►See Research by Subject to find subject-specific databases, journals, and other resources.

Main Access Points

Legal Literature Indexes