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Research to Write Scholarly Legal or Interdisciplinary Papers

Use this guide to help with the research process for seminar papers or to write an article for publication in a scholarly journal. This guide is inspired by the similarly named one produced by Caitlin Hunter and the Law Librarians at UCLA Law School

Organize your Research

Scholarly legal research involves extensive searching across many databases and sources. The key to success is establishing an organizational system before you begin to record:

  • The databases and searches you've completed.

  • All useful sources you find.

Every researcher develops their own method, and this resource offers common tools to help you build yours.

If you are tech savvy, you may want to combine your use of Zotero with Obsidian to help you keep your files organized and to save you time when creating your Bluebook citations.

Your research plan will depend on the nature of your scholarly article. Here are three examples of research plans tailored for common types of scholarly legal articles, focusing on the steps for how to organize the research effort, not just the eventual outline: