Scholarship in a legal discipline often first appears in journal articles. The UB Law Library journal collection is accessed almost exclusively through our databases. There are two categories of databases, which have different means of access.
Computer-Assisted Legal Research (CALR): These are stand-alone services that contain both primary and secondary sources. Think of them as "The Big Three": Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg. Current students, faculty, and staff are assigned a personal user ID and password and can access these services directly. Each service has its own system for organizing and searching content, and their content is not reflected in outside search tools such as Google Scholar.
Subscription databases: These are collections of journals that the Law Library subscribes to as an institution, as opposed to issuing passwords for each individual. Access to these databases is available through the UB computer network, and you will be prompted for your network ID and password (unless you are using one of the campus computers). You may search across many of these databases with a single search using "discovery tools" such as Google Scholar and ResearchPort.
Google Scholar is a free service that searches across many academic journals in all disciplines. If an article is available to you, either for free on the Internet or through a database we subscribe to, Google Scholar provides a link. To use this feature you must first set up your account to designate the UB Law Library as your home library. Google Scholar also provides links to other articles that have cited the article you are looking at, which is a great way to expand your research. Downsides: It doesn't always catch all of the articles that are available to you through our databases. Most notably, it doesn't search Westlaw, Lexis, or Bloomberg. You also run the risk of being overwhelmed by irrelevant hits, including articles that you don't have direct access to.
The Library Catalog is another way to search across the library's databases. The search interface is much less sophisticated than Google Scholar, but it offers advantages as well: It searches both databases and the library catalog, so you will find books as well as articles; it identifies resources that the library may not own but that are available from other libraries in the University System of Maryland or through interlibrary loan; and you can limit your search to a specific field such as title, author, or subject so you get fewer irrelevant hits. As with Google Scholar, it does not search Westlaw or Lexis, but it will search Bloomberg. Unlike Google Scholar, it will not locate articles that are posted on the web.