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Preemption Checking for Law Reviews & Journals

Make sure your note, comment, or article is sufficiently original to be published; use this guide to walk through your search for similar scholarship.

Indexes - What They Are & Why They Are Essential

Indexes are article finding-tools that tell you whether or not articles on certain topics or by certain authors exist, and they give complete citations to these articles.

Indexes are essential for preemption checking for two reasons:

  • Coverage: Index to Legal Periodicals cites to most of the American law review or journal articles that have been published since 1908. This gives it better coverage than almost any full-text tool. If you are trying to prove the negative — that no article like yours exists — it helps to know that you have searched a source covering almost all published articles.

  • Topical labeling: indexes use labels or tags (commonly called "subject headings" or "descriptors") to show what topics, cases, or statutes an article discusses. These labels let you identify the articles that are actually about the subject, case, or statute you plan to write about, as opposed to those that merely contain offhand references. And using uniform, consistent subject headings/descriptors in your searches greatly increases the chances that you will find all articles on a topic regardless of the terminology the authors may have used.

Legal Indexes Available through BLS Library

Is the Journal I Need at BLS?

So you have a citation to a great-sounding article — but not direct link to the full text.... How do you tell if the article is available at BLS? Just use BLS's "Find a Source" to look up the title of the journal that published the article. If that journal is available at BLS, it will (usually) show up in Find a Source.  

(One caveat: Find a Source doesn't tell you if a journal is on Westlaw or on Lexis Advance.)