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Research Tips for Faculty Research Assistants

This guide supplements training for research assistants for law faculty.

Overview

I like to think of research guides as the librarians' secret weapons! I know that you are using this research guide to help train you to be a faculty research assistant, but did you know the BYU Law Library has research guides for a lot of specific areas of law? And because so much of law is connected to other disciplines, using the BYU Lee Library's research guides could also be helpful! 

Research guides are webpages that compile recommended resources from librarians. Generally, those resources include books, databases, and websites. These will be resources specific to the topic of the research guide, so they will be more in-depth than this training in this research guide.

Where to Find Research Guides

This link lists all the research guides that the BYU Law Library has made. Look through it and find ones that pertain to the area(s) of law that your professor publishes in. Research guides can be helpful because the BYU Law Library subscribes to a lot of databases that can be useful to your research--so many that we couldn’t cover them all in this training! But the databases that cover certain areas are listed on the applicable research guides, so that is the best way to find these specialized databases. Contact the law librarian associated with the research guide for help on how to use the databases.

 

This lists the research guides that the BYU Lee Library has made. These research guides can connect you to books, databases, and websites that you can get access to through the BYU Lee Library. If the area of law you are researching connects to another discipline, consider checking out this list to see if there is a useful research guide there. Contact the BYU Lee Library librarian that is associated with that research guide for further assistance.

I like to look at research guides from other law libraries. Sometimes they are more robust than the ones I've made, and I look to them to help me find additional resources. Looking at the research guides is free to anyone. Just google them to find them! I recommend googling "research guide" and "law library" and [the topic you are interested in] to find other research guides on point. The only downside is their links may be to their internal catalog and their database subscriptions, so the links will only work for free resources. BUT you can take the names of the resources and then search our catalogs to see if we have them.

Still can't find that specific resource? Request it through interlibrary loan! While using another law library's research guide is an extra step to finding the resource, it's still a way to connect you with new resources you may not have found otherwise. I always start with BYU research guides, but then I branch out to other libraries if I still have more I want to find. 

The two law libraries that have especially well-regarded research guides are: