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New Resource Available

September 20, 2000 Author: CDLCategories:

a. Harcourt Health Sciences Collection

Harcourt Health Sciences Collection of 64 medical and scientific journals is now available through Academic Press [http://www.idealibrary.com/].

A complete list of journals published now on IDEAL is viewable at http://www.idealibrary.com/links/journals.

NOTE: The Harcourt Health Sciences journals are not yet in the CDL Directory of Collections and Services; they will be added within the next 2 weeks.  You can access them directly from the URL provided.

b. Academic Universe Adds Shepard’s® for Supreme Court Cases (Linda Kennedy, UCD)

After extensive negotiations, Lexis-Nexis has implemented Shepard’s® Citation Service for U.S. Supreme Court cases on LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe.  (Academic Universe, a Tier 2 resource, is available at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara.)  Shepard’s® is one of the tools on which legal researchers rely to validate their citations and to locate additional authorities that support their arguments.

To directly access this feature, click on the link in Legal Research entitled “Shepard’s® for U.S. Supreme Court.”

Two versions are available:

  • Shepard’s® For Validation (KWIC) limits your results to Subsequent Appellate History and those citing references that have editorial analysis or that were added within the most recent two months.
  • Shepard’s® For Research (FULL) provides Prior History and Subsequent Appellate History as well as all citing references from cases, statutes, law reviews and periodicals, and other secondary sources.

You can also “Shepardize” a Supreme Court case once the case is retrieved from the other search menus in the legal research area. The Shepard’s® logo will be displayed as a hypertext link at the top left of the page.  If the case is not a Supreme Court case, you will receive an error message.  Lexis-Nexis indicates it will try to negotiate the addition of Shephardizing for other types of cases, but the chances of success are not promising.

Other new additions to Academic Universe:
Asian Women (November 1993-)
Bulletin of the World Health Organization (1999-)
Gender Matters Quarterly (February 1999-)
Gender Studies News and Views (September 1994-)
Investors Chronicle (1990-)
Lloyd’s List (9/24/99-)
Les Echos (French business newspaper, 1993-)

Resources Removed (Gannett newspapers):
Cincinnati Enquirer
Detroit News
Des Moines Register

Information on titles added and deleted from Academic Universe by month, plus text and Excel lists of all titles is available at: http://cisweb.lexis-nexis.com/marketsource/reports.htm.

General Searching Tips

  • Searching for a specific title – choose “Sources” in the topmost menu bar.
  • Getting information about a title – choose “About this Title” from the results screen to get coverage-date, selected or full-text, timing of updates.
  • Going directly to the resource – choose “Search This Title” (this takes you to the appropriate search screen to retrieve text from the work).

Note: The Academic Universe Source List, which lists more than five thousand titles, continues to be error prone, although a number of “Search this Title” errors were fixed this summer.  A new product manager for academic content, Stephen Want, has been hired.  He will be conducting a review of the source list in order to ensure that it accurately reflects the publication content, maps to the correct search screen, and to add ISSN numbers.

Academic Universe Categories
One of the peculiar facets of Academic Universe is how it categorizes information.  For example, Academic Universe includes a number of gender-related titles (journals such as the Journal of Gender Studies and pamphlet material such as Position Paper on Honor Killings) that are searched under “Industry News” in the News category, not a place one would normally think of looking.  Gender-related titles that are more legal in nature are searched under Law Reviews.