This guide was created on 8/30/24 using the University of San Francisco: Dorraine Zief Law Library - Preemption Checking for Law Reviews and Journals as a template.
If your proposed article involves academic disciplines other than law — areas like economics, political science, history, sociology, gender studies, psychology, business and management — then you should check for articles in those areas that might preempt your project.
This added step will take some time, but it should be worthwhile. You may find not only that you are not preempted, but that there is a lot of useful scholarship that will help you research your article and shape your arguments.
Your search results may include articles for which only the citation — and not the full text — is not available. To find the full text of an article when you have the citation, enter the title of the journal in the Journal Finder.
These tools let you search across disciplines without limiting your search to a single academic area or field. (These tools will often lead to or cite to articles from both scholarly and non-scholarly sources. They also might lead to legal articles as well.)
Multi-disciplinary database of journal articles covering nearly every area of academic study, including humanities, social sciences, and medical sciences. Also includes indexing and abstracts for additional journals.
Provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics, law, and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Coverage varies for each title.
Cross-disciplinary database providing full text access to thousands of scholarly journals, working papers, newspaper articles, and conference papers and proceedings. Also includes access to historical New York Times articles.
Provides full-text access to over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly journals and book-length scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
The BLS Library subscribes to many article-finding tools devoted to individual academic fields, such as economics, business, psychology, sociology, history, etc.
To discover which tools are available for your, visit:
Google Scholar, while not comprehensive, provides a quick way to get a cross-disciplinary set of articles. It can be especially useful as you start your research and are still refining your search terms.
Indexes scholarly materials such as journal articles. Also provides searchable full text access to federal and state case law.
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.)
Includes A to Z list of full text journals available in the library's subscription databases. Also includes selected open access journals.