Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Ebsco's PsycINFO

PsycINFO - one of the EBSCO databases - is a wonderful resource to use for searches related to psychology. An important thing to remember is that PsycINFO is a digitized collection of abstracts from professional journals. With that being said, most searches will not yield full text information. No problem! Just bring your citation information to the circulation desk and our staff will try to locate the full text of the article from another library.


Using LexisNexis to locate specific legal cases

Have you ever needed to find information about a legal case? Just use Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.

Here is how:

If you are on campus, click on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe which is located under the "General Databases" on the Online Databases page. If you are off-campus, be sure to click the link at the top of the page which states "If you are using a computer off-campus, please use this link instead"; log on with your credentials and then click on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.

Your screen will look like this.  We are going to focus on the "Legal Case" area.








It will be easier to locate information if you know which jurisdiction your case falls under, state or federal.
Click here for more information about jurisdiction from the United States Courts. 
If your case involves Federal Jurisdiction, include the United States of America as one of the parties. If your case involves State Jurisdiction, include the name of the state as one of the parties.

Here is an example:

To locate information on Bernie Madoff, use "United States of America" and "Madoff" within the parties area.



Here are the results:

Choose "oldest to newest" to read results in chronological order.



Click on the first entry to open:




Here is how you create the citation:

"Case Name." Case Citation (Date of publication)Name of databaseMedium of publication  
           consulted. Date accessed.               

"United States v. Madoff." 586 F. Supp. 2d 240 (2009). LexisNexis Academic. Web. Date Accessed: 

          2012/11/27.




Check back often for more LRC tips!