Washington & Lee Law School
Current Law Journal Content

Explanation

 

Current Law Journal Content

Source of the Journal Content Information Most journals are indexed from 2005 onwards, except that there is a project underway to extend the coverage back to 2000 (which project is almost complete for U.S. general law reviews). The database contains no articles in full-text, though it might contain links to full-text. CLJC is an indexing database (without any subject analysis) that can reconstitute the text arrangement of an issue's table of contents. The table of contents information is obtained from a number of sources (sources are shown if you click on "List journals", using either "All", or the first letter of the journal):

Displaying Tables of Contents for a Date Range and/or Country

To display a contents listing for multiple journals, enter either a number of "days ago", or enter a date range. "0" days ago is today, "6" days ago includes today and the previous 6 days. Date ranges must be entered in the form YYYY-MM-DD. If only the "From" date is completed, then today's date will be used in the "To" field. Dates are usually the date the issue was added to the database, but in some instances may be the approximate date that the issue was published. A country may also be selected, this being usually the country of origin of the journal publisher, but sometimes may be the country that the journal is institutionally affiliated with. Note that country may not be of great relevence, for example, many English language journals of international scope are published in the Netherlands.

Searching for Articles

Case Sensitivity: Search words, logical connectors and field names are not case sensitive.

Word Expansion: Use an asterisk as the last character of a word to expand the word to words beginning with that stem. The word stem must have a least two characters. The asterisk cannot be used within a word.

Logical Connectors: If no AND, OR, NOT is used then words and fields have an implied AND between them, except that quoted phrases are searched as a unit. When combining AND, OR, NOT it is very important to use parentheses to be certain of the search logic. NOT is processed first, then AND, then OR, so e.g. (CRIME or CRIMINAL) and HIV would need the parenthesis to prevent retrieving unexpected results.

Fields: If you don't use a field name then ONLY the author, title, and abstract fields will be searched (note that the journal name will NOT be searched). Field options are:
JO (journal name), e.g. jo("yale law journal")
JC (journal code), e.g. jc(2)
AU (author name), e.g. au(garner or jones)
TI (article title), e.g. ti("law of torts")
AB (article abstract - if any), e.g. ab(crim*)
DA (date i.e. year of publication), e.g. da(2007), da(2006-2007), da(>2005), da(>2004 and <2008)

Stop-Words: All single character words are stop-words (noise-words) and approximately another 100 common words are stop-words. Stop-words are removed from user searches. However when stop-words are included in a double-quoted phrase, e.g., "security and the forward", this is converted to "security x x forward" to show that while the stop-words are not searched their position is counted.

Menu Options: Most of the menu choices apply to the search, such as country of publication and added date or year of publication ranges.

Some Examples of Linking to Current Law Journal Content

Limiting Results to Journals With a Journal Score Greater Than Some Number

As well as sorting results by journal score it's also possible to limit search results or TOC displays to just journals with a score greater then the number entered. For an explanation of the scoring method see http://lawlib.wlu.edu/LJ/method.asp#combinedscore (the score being a combination of impact-factor and total cites). Journals have a normalized score between 0 and 100 (Harvard Law Review is 100). Journal scoring is very U.S.-centric - as a consequence entering a journal score number will eliminate some journals, but if you have a U.S. viewpoint and wish to remove lesser cited journals from view then this feature may be useful.

Links to Full-Text Sources via an openURL Server

Authored article entries contain, by default, a link to an openURL server at W&L Law School, and a link to the OCLC resolver registry. Users may remove both, or substitute other openURL compliant links. Users who are pointing to their own institution's openURL server may change the label that is displayed after each authored entry and at the top each TOC page - this would be done in the user profile area, or on the URL line by appending "&jf1label=XXXX" or "&jf2label=XXXX". The links offer possibilities for finding journal volumes/issues/articles but there is no guarantee that any of the suggested sources actually have the needed article. User discrimination is needed in judging probabilities as to which source might be useful, e.g. the openURL resolver may show possible sources for a recent article as HeinOnline, Lexis, and Westlaw, but a very recent article is unlikely to be available on HeinOnline (a predominantly archive database), and more likely available on Lexis or Westlaw. Note that the W&L Law School resolver does not compare the issue date of a needed item with any knowledge in the database as to coverage dates by sources - so even though the resolver may say "HeinOnline (1946-2003)" it will nevertheless display that source link even for a recent article.

Another method for enabling outbound links to your own institution's openURL server is to use Firefox as your browser (if you don't have Firefox, download it from http://www.mozilla.com) and then install an extension as described below. COinS ("ContextObject in SPAN") code has been added to CLJC as hidden data embedded in the HTML code allowing users, who have appropriately configured their own browser, to display them as links to their own institution's openURL server. There are a couple of useful Firefox extensions that, when you display a Table of Contents record in CLJC will display a link from each authored article entry to your own institution's openURL server:
LibX: The LibX homepage is http://libx.org/. To see a sample of how this works you can install the LibX version for Washington & Lee by (using Firefox) going to http://law.wlu.edu/library/libx/libx.asp and following the directions. Until the authors of LibX have a web registration system operational, anyone wanting to create a LibX version for their own institution should contact LibX at their web site.
OpenURL Referrer: Using Firefox, go to http://www.openly.com/openurlref/ and download an extension to Firefox by following that page's Installation Instructions. The first time you restart your browser after installing the extension a configuration window will appear allowing you to record the web address of your own institution's openURL server.

User Profile

A user profile will save an individual's preferences as to which journals are included, together with menu choices such as sort order and which links are visible. The profile is useful in setting up a weekly alert, setting up an RSS feed, or viewing the website. A profile will also optionally store any word searches a user wants run against database additions each week. Profile creation gives a user an ID (such as "999") and a privateID (such as "NUTOKOHUGU"). The privateID which, as its name suggests, should not be disseminated to others, allows modification of the user profile and cancellation of the subscription. The ID can be used by anyone who knows it to connect to a user profile. For example, a librarian could establish a profile listing only journals of local interest and could then send a weekly link to others in the organization (such as, http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/index.aspx?date1=2007-07-08&date2=2007-07-14&id=999) which would limit the output to the selected journals. For those choosing an e-mail alert a notice will will be sent each Sunday containing a link to the previous week's additions.

Establishing a User Profile

You may establish a user profile as part of the subscription process, or if you choose not to leave an e-mail address, then a profile can be established independently of any subscription. A profile allows users to establish various user-profile choices. The entire list of journals will be shown with checkboxes beside each journal allowing journals to be excluded for the user. The journal list can be sorted alphabetically, by country, or by journal score. Other profile choices are:

Displaying CLJC as a Column in a Webpage

The code to include in a web page would be similar to either,
<iframe src="http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/index.aspx?format=brief&top=20&id=185" frameborder="1" height="300" width="380" scrolling="yes"></iframe>
    or, alternatively,
<object data="http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/index.aspx?format=brief&top=20&id=185" border="1" type="text/html" height="300" width="380"></object>

Creating a Link to a Specific Journal's TOC

A web-link can be created to the TOC of a specific journal in Current Law Journal Content, by using either, or both, of ISSN or journal-title within the URL. The way it works is to start the URL with:
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/index.aspx?issue=yes
then add either, or both, of &issn=0044-0094 or &title=yale law journal
(substituting, of course, whatever ISSN or journal title is appropriate) Thus, http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/index.aspx?issue=yes&issn=0044-0094 will retrieve a current TOC listing for the Yale Law Journal.

Should you have your own openURL server and desire links onwards from the TOC entries to that server then add:
&journalfinder1=yes&journalfinder1label=Yale&journalfinder1url=http://www.yale.edu/someserver (substituting your own label, and your own server address)
Regardless of whether or not you have your own openURL server, if you want to turn off links to the Washington & Lee Law Library's openURL server, then add:
&journalfinder2=no
As each optional part in the URL must start with an "&", thus an "&" is not permitted inside those fields - so if you had a title "Behavioral Sciences & the Law" you would need to use "Behavioral Sciences and the Law" (or you could use the hex-code, "Behavioral Sciences %26 the Law"). Strictly speaking spaces should be replaced by "+" or "%20" but web browsers usually take care of that. Approximately 85% of the entries in the database have ISSNs, so ISSNs are usually the shortest, simplest choice (they can be entered with or without the hyphen), but if an ISSN doesn't work then use the journal title instead.

Viewing Tables of Contents via a Feedreader

You can sign-up for an online account, e.g. with http://www.google.com/reader or http://www.newsgator.com and read RSS feeds via the web. Or, you can download and install software on your computer, e.g http://www.feedexplorer.net Then enter a URL such as http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx (see further examples below). A feedreader will periodically connect to the journal listings and automatically retrieve recent content.

A link to copy into your feedreader would look like one of the following:
 
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx       (defaults to age=4 days and all countries)
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?country=australia
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?country=us&age=5&id=175
 
    Or to retrieve specific journals:
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?mainid=25&top=1 (CLJC's jnl-code, most recent only)(also an RSS link is shown next to each journal in the alphabetical list)
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?issn=0065-1915
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?title=yale+law+journal&top=2
 
    Or to retrieve a search result:
(after running a search at index.aspx you will see an RSS link preceding the search result)
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?search=(crime or criminal) and evidence
http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/xml.aspx?search=au(john smith)+jo("nova law review")&outformat=refworks

For anyone wanting to input a complete list of individual journal feeds there is an OPML file (a format that many feed readers will import from) at http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/feeds/lawjournalsOPML.xml.