1. Go to FINDit.
2. Search for the article title e.g. "Ignorance of the criminal law, and duties to avoid it" click on the 'Articles' search scope.
1. Go to FINDit and select Find Journals.
2. Search here for the title of the journal e.g. Modern Law Review.
Start with Westlaw UK and look in the Journals section, this has the Legal Journals Index.
Lexis+ UK also has a Journals section.
If the full text of the article is not available immediately within the legal databases make a note of the full citation details and follow the instructions above for 'Searching for a Specific Journal Article?'.
If a journal article does not appear in FINDit > 'Articles' the next place to look is 'Find Journals'. Look for the title of the journal here.
If we don't subscribe to the journal, sign in to FINDit and click on British Library Request and the BL will supply a copy of the article.
First five requests are free of charge.
Google Scholar is a great way of searching for information and is a useful supplement to database searches.
A journal is an academic magazine, sometimes also known as a periodical or serial.
Published at regular intervals e.g. weekly, or monthly, or quarterly.
They are good for keeping up to date with legal developments.
They contain articles by learned authors, such as academics, judges or legal practitioners.
They may also contain 'case notes' or 'case comments' which give a brief analysis of the important legal issues in a case. If a case has not been officially reported in the case law reports, a journal 'case comment' may be the only information that is available.
Journal article citations usually contain the following information:
Law journals are often referred to by abbreviation
e.g. MLR for Modern Law Review.
To find out what the abbreviation means, check the online:
Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
Or if you are in the Treforest library you can check:
Here are some examples of online and print journals you may find useful:
This list is based on the Top Ten Law Journals Ranking for REF 2014 from Mathias Siems
Westlaw UK Journals offers two services: full-text articles and article abstracts:
There are thousands of articles in full text published by Sweet & Maxwell, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and others.
The article abstracts service, the Legal Journals Index contains over half a million abstracts of articles from English language legal journals published in the UK and EU, providing seamless integration to full text journal articles (where available) and direct links to relevant case law and legislation.
The Law Journal Library from Heinonline is a full text journal archive service, each title begins with the first issue of the journal but never contains the most recent issues. It is mainly American but does contain some UK and European journal titles.
You may also wish to search in JSTOR Arts & Sciences II Collection which contains 889 journal titles for Law, again mainly American titles.