STANFORD LAW & POLICY REVIEW SOURCEPULLING GUIDE

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1 STANFORD LAW & POLICY REVIEW SOURCEPULLING GUIDE WHY SOURCEPULLING? WHY THIS GUIDE? This guide is designed to help you with your first task as a SLPR editor: sourcepulling. An article may have 300 footnotes that repeatedly cite to the same 100 sources. There is no point for the person editing the last 10 pages of an article to look up the same book that the person who edited the first 10 pages of the article looked up. Thus, the goal of sourcepulling is to centralize all the necessary materials for the citechecking and bluebooking stages of editing. The ease and speed of your first round edit and your fellow AEs first round edit depends heavily on successful sourcepulling, and it is a good way to acquaint yourself with legal materials, the Stanford library system, and the support services available to you (reference librarians, Westlaw/Lexis representatives, your SLPR senior staff, etc.). Crown Law Library (Crown) assigns shelves to each SLS journal. SLPR s shelves are located on the third floor of the library. If you enter the third floor from the stairs, turn right and proceed all the way to the wall. SLPR s shelves are on your left hand side. Each article will be assigned to a shelf, and once each article s sources are placed on the shelves, they must remain in there, so all SLPR editors, the law librarians, and the MEs know where to find them. HOW TO SOURCEPULL: THE BASICS Your Senior Editor (SE) will give you an excel spreadsheet listing all the sources in the article that you will be editing. The spreadsheet will specify which sources you ll be pulling and which sources have been assigned to other members of your team. Your job is to locate the sources assigned to you, retrieve non-electronic sources from the libraries, and update all of the fields on the sourcepull list. Please note that if a citation refers to a particular page of the source, you should still pull the entire source. Once you have completed the sourcepull list, send it back to your SE who will compile your team s work and return it to you for citechecking and editing. FINDING SOURCES... 2 SOCRATES & THE STANFORD LIBRARY SYSTEM... 2 WESTLAW AND LEXIS... 2 ONLINE JOURNALS AND DATABASES... 2 THE INTERNET & NON-ACADEMIC ONLINE RESOURCES... 2 THE AUTHOR... 3 RETRIEVING SOURCES: PHYSICAL MATERIALS... 3 MOBILE LIBRARY MATERIALS... 3 RECALLING/REQUESTING LIBRARY MATERIALS... 4 IMMOBILE LIBRARY MATERIALS... 4 RETRIEVING SOURCES: ELECTRONIC MATERIALS... 4 WESTLAW/LEXIS... 4 ONLINE MATERIALS... 5 COMPLETING THE SOURCEPULL SPREADSHEET /25/2010 SLPR Volume XXII Sourcepulling Guide Page 1 of 6

2 FINDING SOURCES Socrates & The Stanford Library System - Socrates, the Stanford University library catalog, is your first stop for all hardcopy materials. Almost all of the books on campus are accounted for in the Socrates system, including those in the Crown Law Library (Crown). 1 If you are on campus (i.e. connecting to the internet via the Stanford network), you can reach Socrates by typing socrates in the URL bar of your internet browser. Otherwise, visit 2 Each record will indicate the source s call number and location. Crown has a hefty collection, but you may also have to resort to other Stanford libraries. 3 Westlaw and Lexis - Westlaw and Lexis are obviously extremely useful resources for legal documents, especially cases. Although we, your MEs, like to think of ourselves as Westlaw/Lexis savvy, we are not the experts. Refer to your Westlaw/Lexis training, handouts, representatives, and support systems for guidance on efficient database navigation. Online Journals and Databases Although Westlaw/Lexis are good tools for finding materials from legal journals, some series remain incomplete (usually missing older volumes). Further, SLPR authors often cite to non-legal journals which are not included in the Westlaw/Lexis collections. Luckily (and not surprisingly), Stanford subscribes to a massive number of electronic journals and databases. Listed below are some methods of accessing these resources. Socrates provides links to the online versions of journals. Search by periodical title and follow the link in the record for the periodical. Information about e-resources available through Stanford University and lists of particular journals and databases can be found at Crown has listed a number of online legal resources which may be helpful for your search. Visit and ask a librarian if you have any questions. HeinOnline 4 ( and JSTOR ( are particularly valuable because they house a number of journals used in legal scholarship. If you are on campus, Stanford will automatically sign you into any subscription database. To access these sources off-campus, follow Stanford s instructions for setting up a proxy server ( The Internet & Non-Academic Online Resources - Westlaw/Lexis try to make you think that everything legal can be found within their electronic domains. This is not true. Many of the sources you seek will be found elsewhere online. For this, as with all things, google is your friend. If you 1 Note, the Business School Library and Medical School Library have their own catalogs, and not everything in their collections is included in Socrates. The Jackson Business School Library catalog is available at The Lane Medical School Library Catalog is available at 2 Similarly, you can reach the Stanford Library system s mainpage by typing sulair into your web browser s URL field or by visiting 3 Maps of the campus libraries and lists of library hours are available from the law library and online ( 4 HeinOnline is a great resource for older legal documents and journals. 10/25/2010 SLPR Volume XXII Sourcepulling Guide Page 2 of 6

3 don t know what/where a source is (and don t feel like trucking over to Crown to ask a librarian), just google it. This is especially important to keep in mind for random reports cited by authors. Here are some examples of great resources that exist outside of the academic realm. GPOAccess ( This is an amazing source for recent and current federal materials. Older documents must be found using traditional Socrates/Lexis/Westlaw methods. United States Code ( Federal Register ( Code of Federal Regulations ( House/Senate Hearings ( House/Senate Reports ( Thomas ( This is the congressional library for pending legislation and related materials. Newspaper websites (various). As you know, many newspapers provide their online archives for free. Don t spend time searching for an article on Lexis if you know you can find it quickly on nytimes.com. Keep in mind, however, that we need the original page number for the citation. Not all online newspaper archives track this information. Findlaw.com ( Although Findlaw isn t fabulously designed, it does compile and link to some useful websites, particularly for state-by-state information. Stanford Law School Librarians know and love these resources and many more. When in doubt, ask them for guidance. The Author Occasionally, the combined expertise of the AEs, SEs, MEs, Librarians, and Westlaw/Lexis Reference Attorneys is insufficient to unearth an obscure source. In these cases, you should notify your SE who will request that the Author send a copy of the irksome document. This is an extraordinary solution and should be reserved for sources that cannot be found through traditional research methods. RETRIEVING SOURCES: PHYSICAL MATERIALS Mobile Library Materials - Check out the books to SLPR. Crown has sent a list of SLPR members to all libraries in the Stanford University library system. When you check out a book (at any library, including Crown 5 ), tell the staff person that you would like to borrow it on behalf of the Stanford Law & Policy Review. 6 This person may or may not check your ID to verify that you are authorized to check books out in our name, and then s/he will scan the SLPR barcode and give you the goods. 7 Crown uses a system of multi-colored paper strips to organize books in the open reserve room. When you check books 5 Do not simply relocate law library books to the SLPR shelves. They, too, must be checked out to SLPR. For whatever reason, Crown requires that SLPR and other journals borrow books from the first floor loan desk. If you try to use the one on the second floor, they will send you downstairs. 6 If you need to check out a book from the Medical Library or the Biology Library, you will need to check it out under your own ID. Any books you check out of those libraries must be renewed after 28 days. However, the good news is that you don't need to go back to these libraries to renew them. The staff on the 2nd floor of the library can arrange to have the book renewed for you. 7 This process is important for several reasons: 1) You will not be fined for lost or overdue books (Note, however, that it is crucial that we not have lost or overdue books. Please do your part to keep the books where they belong on the SLPR shelves.), 2) You will not have to deal with any recall requests, notices, or renewals related to the books, and 3) SLPR is entitled to keep books longer than individual students. 10/25/2010 SLPR Volume XXII Sourcepulling Guide Page 3 of 6

4 out from Crown, the library staff will automatically give you a purple SLPR flag. For books from other libraries, simply ask someone at a Crown loan desk for as many flags as you have books. Write your article author s name on each flag, place them in the books, and place the books on the SLPR shelves on the third floor of the library. Just to be clear, after checking out a book to SLPR (and obtaining the flags), proceed directly to the SLPR shelves and place it on the appropriate author s shelf where we can keep track of it. Do not remove it from the SLPR shelves, do not put it in a folder, and replace it to its proper shelf whenever you are not using it. Tracking down misplaced books is no fun, and it will prolong the editing process for everyone. If you run into any problems, please contact your MEs or AMEs. Recalling/Requesting Library Materials If a source you are looking for is currently checked out, please contact the MEs or AMEs. DO NOT select the recall button from the online catalog. If you attempt to recall a source on your own, you could cause a lot of extra work for other students and the librarians. Similarly, if the source you seek is nowhere to be found at Stanford, contact the AMEs to initiate an interlibrary loan (ILL) request. Immobile Library Materials Some library materials (reserves, some journals, microfiche, etc.) cannot leave their homes. If you encounter immobile materials in Crown simply indicate their specific Crown location on the sourcepull spreadsheet and write a note in the Comment field. If the immobile materials are located in another library, please photocopy the relevant pages (including the title page and copyright page) using a SLPR copy card. 8 For articles and shorter works in collections, please photocopy the entire document. For books and other lengthy sources, photocopy the cited pages and a couple pages before and after the cited pages. Please write your author s name and the document s source number on the first page of the photocopy, place it in a labeled folder, and file it on the appropriate SLPR shelf. RETRIEVING SOURCES: ELECTRONIC MATERIALS In previous years, we required AEs to generate hard copies for all sources. This entailed cumbersome and wasteful printing, and we have begun to experiment with alternatives. This year we will be doing a combination of printing and directing. Westlaw/Lexis Westlaw/Lexis assign unique database identifiers to each document. Plugging a database identifier into a find by citation field allows you to retrieve the document quickly and easily without more extensive searching. For cases and some other materials (such as the United States Code), the database identifier is simply the citation (e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) 410 US 113 ). For other materials with standard citation formats, the database identifier is a slightly modified version of the raw citation (e.g., David Rudovsky, Police Abuse: Can the Violence Be Contained?, 27 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 465 (1992) 27 HVCRCLLR 465 (Westlaw)). For other materials Lexis/Westlaw simply assign a database identifier according to their own numbering systems (e.g., 1971 WL or 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS ). When you find a source using Westlaw/Lexis, copy and paste the database identifier into the Call No./URL/Database Identifier field of the sourcepull spreadsheet and identify the corresponding 8 The SLPR copy cards are located at the library circulation desk on the 1 st floor and may be checked out to SLPR members. If you do use one of the copy cards, please find a post-it note and indicate the remaining balance before you return it to the library. We don t want the next person to get all the way to a distant library before discovering that the SLPR copy card is empty. If you run into copy card issues, please contact the MEs or AMEs. 10/25/2010 SLPR Volume XXII Sourcepulling Guide Page 4 of 6

5 database for the identifier in the Location field. If you come across an easily recognizable identifier in your sourcepull spreadsheet (e.g., 410 U.S. 113), please avoid the temptation to simply copy and paste it from the Citation field to the Database Identifier field. Take the time to verify that the identifier is correct by plugging it into Westlaw/Lexis. Although the added benefit of all this work may seem relatively small, it streamlines the citechecking process, and your fellow AEs will appreciate your diligence. Online Materials If a document has a unique and manageable URL, copy and paste the URL into the Call No./URL/Database Identifier field of the sourcepull spreadsheet. If the citation itself provides the URL, please verify that the URL is functional before copying and pasting it into the Call No./URL/Database Identifier field. If you manage to find the source online but it does not have a useful URL (e.g., certain electronic databases or badly constructed websites), please either: (1) provide an initial URL and instructions for how to find the document from that URL or (2) print the source and place it on SLPR s shelves with the other hardcopy materials. For printouts, follow the labeling directions above under Immobile Materials and type SLPR Shelf [Article Author] into the location field of the sourcepull spreadsheet. COMPLETING THE SOURCEPULL SPREADSHEET The sourcepull spreadsheet is the master document for all of the sources you just pulled and will allow your fellow AEs to profit from all of your hard work (and visa versa). As you sourcepull, please fill in or correct the bolded fields below. Source # - Each document in your article gets a unique identifying number. Add new sources to the end of the list regardless of where they appear in the article Footnote # - Some footnotes list more than one source and some footnotes do not contain sources at all. Also, the footnote numbering will change as the author adds and removes footnotes. This field allows you to sort the sourcepull list by footnote number so you can easily find the source number (which will not change) for the footnote you re working on. Type of Source/BB Rule Identify the type of source for each citation (book, article, statute, case, website, etc.). This will help you later on when you are trying to decide which Bluebook rule you should use to format the citation. Citation These entries were copied and pasted from the footnotes of the article. Location of Source Explain where the source can be found for citechecking purposes: the SLPR shelf in the library, Internet, Westlaw, or Lexis. Some SEs may have used this field to suggest possible places to look for your source. Replace these suggestions with the actual location of the source. Call No./URL/Database Identifier For library materials, copy and paste each source s call number; for internet sources, copy and paste the URL from your internet browser; for Westlaw/Lexis sources, copy and paste the database identifier. Library Home/Due Date For library materials, use this field to indicate the home library and the due date. ILL/Recall & Date of Request If you recalled a book or requested it through ILL and if it has not arrived by the sourcepulling deadline, please indicate as much and include the date of the request. You will get a notice to your account when the book arrives to the library. Please retrieve the book and place it on the appropriate SLPR shelf in the library. 10/25/2010 SLPR Volume XXII Sourcepulling Guide Page 5 of 6

6 Afterwards, send an to your SE so s/he can update the master sourcepull list. Problems & Comments Explain any problems that you noticed and/or provide additional information for your SE and fellow AEs. Puller Your name appears in the puller field for the sources for which you are responsible. When you have completed your sourcepull and when you have filled in all the fields on the sourcepull spreadsheet, return the spreadsheet to your SE. You are done sourcepulling! As always, if you have any questions, contact your SE or ME. 10/25/2010 SLPR Volume XXII Sourcepulling Guide Page 6 of 6