In addition to just plainly using the search bar on commercial legal databases, you should take note of some of the features each database has which can help you refine your research within each database. Here is a list of features and tips for Lexis and Westlaw that can help you research gender identity and sexual orientation law:

Westlaw:

Practice Areas

• From the Westlaw homepage, select the 'Practice Areas' tab.
• Practice areas that may be relevant are employment, health law, and family law. 
• When you click on a practice area, you can search within it.
  • For example, selecting "Employment Law" and then using the search bar to search for the term 'transgender' will bring up cases. statutes and secondary sources about employment law that specifically include the term transgender. 
• You can also select resource types just after selecting a practice area if you are sure of what type of document you'd like to retrieve. 

Advanced Search

• Use connectors and commands to add precision to your searching. Some examples include:
  • /p will retrieve results where two identified words appear in the same paragraph. 
  • % will exclude certain words from your results.
  • & will retrieve results where two words appear anywhere in the document. 
• These are not the only connectors available. You can view more by clicking "Search Tips" next to the search bar in Lexis.
• You can combine connectors, too. For example:
  • transgender & student /p school %employ! 
    • This string would retrieve results where transgender and student appear in the same paragraph as school, and in which the terms employer, employee, employed, and employment do not appear. 

Content Types

• You can browse materials based on content type by selecting the "content types" tab from the Westlaw homepage. Here, you can  select from cases, secondary sources, and other types.
• One useful content type selection is "Topics & Key Numbers."
  • When you select this content type, you are brought to list of broad topics.
  • One example is "Education". When you click on Education, you can choose from a list to narrow further. 

Lexis:

Practice Areas

• From the Lexis or Lexis+ homepage, select the "Practice Area" tab
• Practice areas that may be relevant are labor & employment law, healthcare law, and civil rights law.
• When you click on a practice area, you can search within that area or select a resource type (much like you can with Westlaw)
• You can also select more specific case or statute topics. For example, the civil rights practice area provides case selections in topics like:
  • due process;
  • education;
  • employment; 
  • and equal protection.

Advanced Search

• Use connectors and commands to add precision to your searching. Some examples include:
  • Quotes (" ") will retrieve documents which  contain an exact phrase. 
  • AND (or &) will retrieve documents with 2 or more identified words anywhere in the document.
  • ! will retrieve word variation of an identified root.
• There are more connectors you can find by selecting advanced search in Lexis and viewing the help materials on connectors and advanced searching.
• You can mix and match connectors, too. For example:
  • "Sexual orientation" AND child! 
    • This will retrieve materials that contain the phrase 'sexual orientation" and the words child, children, and/or childhood somewhere else in the document. 

Content Pages

• You might want to simply browse particular types of content such as legal news or treatises. You can do some by selecting the Content tab on the Lexis homepage. 
  • For one example, selecting 'legal news" provides sources by publisher, by state, or by practice area.

Academic Search Complete

How to access and search this database: 

1. Go to this Research Guide on Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and the Law ⇒ top menu bar, tab: "Sources of Info..." ⇒ text box: "Types of Resources..." ⇒ "UNM databases" ⇒ Academic Search Complete. 
2. If off campus, provide your UNM NetId login information ⇒ Academic Search Complete home screen. 
3. Choose Basic or Advanced search:
   • Advanced search ⇒ enter search terms into search boxes ⇒ specify the relationship between the terms with "AND," "OR," "NOT" in adjacent drop-down boxes.
     • OR
   • Basic Search ⇒ enter all search terms in top search box ⇒ click circles below to find: all search terms, any of the search terms, do a Boolean/Phrase search, or SmartText Searching (info about SmartText searching next to that search option). 
   • Click question mark icon  for specific Boolean operators to the database to use in Basic or Advanced Search. 
4. Scroll down ⇒ limit results by date, full text, scholarly/peer reviewed material, etc.
5. Click Search.
6. Search history will not be preserved past your current session once you navigate to another page or the system logs you out from inactivity. Keep track of your research with a research log. 

Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale)

How to access and search this database: 

1. Go to this Research Guide on Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and the Law ⇒ top menu bar, tab: "Sources of Info..." ⇒ text box: "Types of Resources..." ⇒ "UNM databases" ⇒ Archives of Sexuality and Gender. 
2. If off campus, provide your UNM NetId login information ⇒ Archives of Sexuality and Gender home screen.  *On home screen, we do not advise starting your search  with "Topic Finder" or "Term Frequency" tools at bottom of screen. 
3. Choose Advanced search, then  
   • Enter search terms into search boxes ⇒ specify the relationship between the terms with "AND," "OR," "NOT" in adjacent drop-down boxes.
     • OR
   • At google-style search box at top left of page containing magnifying-glass icon: enter all search terms in top search box ⇒ further customize your search with operators and special characters listed further down midpage under "Search tips." Example: transgender* n5 athlet* tells database to find transgender, transgendered, etc. within 5 words of athlete, athletic, etc.
4. Scroll down ⇒ limit results by date, content type, etc.
5. Click Search.
6. Search history will likely not be preserved past your current session once you navigate to another page or the system logs you out from inactivity. Keep track of your research with a research log. 

Gender Statistics (World Bank Databank)

How to access and search this database: 

1. Go to this Research Guide on Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and the Law ⇒ top menu bar, tab: "Sources of Info..." ⇒ text box: "Types of Resources..." ⇒  "UNM databases" ⇒ Gender Statistics.
2. At homepage for World Bank Databank: scroll down ⇒ Gender Statistics 
3. Select variables from the following dimensions: "country," "series," "time" to view a report. 
4. You can download results in various formats. 

ProQuest Databases e.g. Gender Watch

How to access and search this database: 

1. Go to this Research Guide on Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and the Law ⇒  top menu bar, tab: "Sources of Info..." ⇒ text box: "Types of Resources..." ⇒ "UNM databases" ⇒ Gender Watch.
2. If off campus, provide your UNM NetId login information ⇒ ProQuest Gender Watch home screen. 
3. Choose Basic or Advanced search:
   • Advanced search ⇒ enter search terms into search boxes ⇒ specify the relationship between the terms with "AND," "OR," "NOT" in adjacent drop-down boxes.
     • OR
   • Basic Search ⇒ enter all search terms in top search box ⇒ click "Search tips" below the search box and to the right to find Boolean operators in order to do a Boolean/Phrase search. 
     • Example: transgender* N/3 educat* N/3 media N/3 wom?n  tells the database to find transgender, transgendered etc. within 3 words of educate, educating, educator etc. within 3 words of media within 3 words of woman, women, womyn (the question mark acts as a single placeholder)
4. In either Basic or Advanced search function, you can customize if you want the material retrieved to be peer reviewed.
5. Scroll down ⇒ limit results by date, material, etc.
6. Click Search.
7. Search history will not be preserved past your current session once you navigate to another page or the system logs you out from inactivity. Keep track of your research with a research log. 

Hein Online

How to access and search this database: 

1. Go to this Research Guide on Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and the Law ⇒ top menu bar, tab: "Sources of Info..." ⇒ text box: "Types of Resources..." ⇒  "UNM databases" ⇒ Hein Online. 
2. If off campus, provide your UNMSOL login information as specified ⇒ Hein Online home screen. 
3. If you have a known citation, like 15 Nat. Resources J. 144 (2015), click the "Citation" tab at the top and enter it there to pull up your document. 
4. Otherwise, drill down to the sub database you wish to search e.g. Law Journal Library and choose to do a basic or Advanced search:
   • Click "Search Help" for specific Boolean operators to the database to use in basic or Advanced Search.
   • basic search (default) ⇒ enter all search terms in top search box, which will search full text of materials. 
     • OR
   • Click Advanced search at top of page ⇒ enter search terms into search boxes ⇒ choose fields in which to search e.g. full-text, and specify the relationship between the terms with "AND," "OR," "NOT" in adjacent drop-down boxes ⇒ enter any data limiters on the last line. 
5. Click Search.
6. Search history will not be preserved past your current session once you navigate to another page or the system logs you out from inactivity. Keep track of your research with a research log. 

What does "peer reviewed" mean?

A peer-reviewed periodical publication is one in which articles go through an official editorial process that involves review and approval by the author's peers (people who are experts in the same subject area). Some (but not all) scholarly publications are peer reviewed in our field. Some trade publications are peer reviewed. 

Note: A periodical is a type of publication that is issued at regularly recurring intervals; for example, a magazine or journal.

There are a number of strategies to help you find quality law journal and law review articles on the topics of gender identity and sexual orientation. We recommend searching both full-text databases and non-full text resources - such as indexes - for finding these articles. 

If you wish to research what your colleagues in the profession are writing about in draft or pre-publication format, check open-access repositories like SSRN. 

We also recommend using Google Scholar to pull articles and other materials on your topic from a wide variety of publications and internet sources, including from UNM databases as well as open access materials. 

For details on researching law review and journal articles, see our Research Guide on Finding Journal Articles, as well as the embedded video on the same topic, above. 

Regarding specific search suggestions, you may wish to try using Legal Source--a database providing indexing and full-text coverage of well-respected scholarly journals. This database is located in the UNMSOL library's A-Z database list.

Here is an example of a search string you might want to try in Legal Source:

• If searching for the subject "gender nonconforming children in schools," navigate to legal source and click boxes: "apply related words," "apply equivalent subjects, "
• In the search box at top type: "gender nonconforming" /5 child! /p school!  and click "search" 
• This would retrieve results that contain the phrase "gender nonconforming" within five worlds of child/children and within the same paragraph as school/schools/schooling.

Below are a couple of links to databases mentioned to get you started. Please click the link to the Research Guide on Finding Journal Articles for the rest of the important databases you need for your law journal research.

Current awareness of developing areas of law can be important for lawyers as well as those who many be writing a substantial paper. One method that can be helpful is to set up a Google alert in Google Scholar.

• If you navigate to Google Scholar and execute a search, you will see an option to the left of the results that says "create alert."
• Click on it and confirm or modify the search query in the first box.
• In the second box, provide you email address.
• Anytime time new relevant results pertaining to your search query are indexes by Google, you will receive an email containing the new information.
  • One example of how this could be helpful might be if you are interested in an unsettled or controversial area of law, like transgender persons in sports. You might want to set the query to "transgender and sports" (not in quotes) to get alerts about new articles on the subject when they appear in Google. 

The video below demonstrates how to set up an alert at 4:10. 

For other current awareness tools, check out our video on "Topic Selection" in our series of videos.

Don't forget that databases such as Lexis and Westlaw provide searchable legal news articles, too. By browsing the news in different topic areas and setting up alerts, you can be sure to stay abreast of legal issue in gender identity and sexual orientation law topics through your time in law school and beyond.