This research guide is designed for staff and board members of journals at the University of San Francisco School of Law. It's intended to help them find reliable digital versions (ideally in PDF format) of documents frequently cited in law review and law journal articles.
If you're looking for a type of document not listed here, contact a Zief Law Library reference librarian.
Most of the sources in this research guide are behind pay walls. Lexis and Westlaw require personal accounts, and USF law students have automatic on-campus access to the rest of the subscription-only sources. For the sources licensed for off-campus access, the general protocol is to enter your USF network login information (also called the "MyUSF" or "USFConnect" login information). The link below takes you to detailed remote access instructions.
The examples you'll see throughout this research guide are used in training, and are typical of the types of citations you'd find in unedited and un-cite-checked law review articles.
These research tools have rich collections of PDF documents. If you are looking for a type of document — especially a government document — not covered in this research guide, browse these tools:
Use the "Advanced" mode on your search engine, and see if you are able to limit your results by file type to PDF documents. If there's no link to an "advanced" search option, you can usually add a special command to your search terms to limit your results to PDF documents. For an example, see the link to Bing, below.
Don't give up on finding your document before you try several different search engines. Google is great, but sometimes other search engines dig further into sites, or even include sites Google did not crawl and index.
With these sorts of sources, it is more likely that you will need to look for a non-digital version. Check for a PDF version using the tips in this guide, but if you don't find one quickly, pull the non-digital document.
Books — especially books not in the public domain.
Non-legal journal/periodical/magazine articles — especially older articles.
Occasional older Congressional reports, hearings, and documents.
If the USF libraries don't have a book or an article you need, we can arrange to borrow books or get copies of articles for you from another library.