Research Tips for Faculty Research Assistants

Faculty Research Assistants, welcome! The law librarians at BYU made this research guide with you in mind. We wanted to give you a place for your first research training with tips that you could come back to over and over again as you help the law faculty with their research. This is meant to be a cursory view of various research topics and resources that you may use as a research assistant. 

This research guide was made for the audience being RAs that are 2Ls and 3Ls for law faculty. If you are an RA in a different category (like an incoming 1L, undergraduate, or non-law graduate student RA), then please look at the Incoming 1L RAs tab for additional information.

As always, if you have any questions or need further explanations, feel free to reach out to any of the law librarians by email or phone. We are happy to help immediately or set an appointment through Zoom to work with you.

1. Make sure to read the "More information..." under the various resources to get a little bit of background information on each.

2. The video tutorials demonstrate how to research the resources on each given page. Try to replicate the demonstrations in the video tutorials so that you feel comfortable applying them in your own work as a research assistant.

3. If there are pages on this research guide that you think you won’t use, feel free to skip them. You can ask your faculty member to help you identify those topics and resources you likely will not be using.

4. Check the Bluebook tab on this research guide for how to cite correctly the various resources from the other tabs on this research guide.

5. If you have questions regarding the content, resources, or research tips on a certain page, reach out to the law librarian that worked on that page. Their contact info is on the left side under the list of pages.

6. You can use this research guide on Source Pulls (which was written for BYU Law student journal articles) to help you find the most original versions of additional sources that are not already listed on this research guide in the various tabs over on the left.