You will also want to search the internet for primary and secondary legal materials.
This can be especially useful for human rights law research as many treaties and human rights case law reports are made freely available on the web via organisations such as the UN and the Council of Europe. You will also find lots of commentary materials from advocacy groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
You can use online search techniques with search engines such as google, e.g. human rights AND "right to family life"
What is Google Scholar?
The Google Scholar search engine crawls publisher websites and open access repositories for journal article content.
You can configure the Scholar settings so that you are linked through to the full text of journal titles that are accessible to you through the University.
Take a look at the Making the most of Google Scholar guide for guidance on adjusting the settings of this search engine. By adjusting your settings you will give yourself the best chance of finding full text materials when searching on Google Scholar.
Another useful discovery service is Google Books. As its name suggests, the focus of that service is book content.
Copyright free material will be available to view in full, other titles will be available in bibliographic format only with some limited search functionality.
The ability to evaluate the academic quality of the information you find is a core aspect of scholarly research.
This is particularly important when searching online and using tools like Google. While textbooks and academic journals will likely have gone through a rigorous review and editing process, there are no such guarantees for much of the information you can find online.
The CRAAP test provides simple criteria for judging the academic quality of information. By asking some questions of the sources you encounter, you can successfully boost the quality of information you use in your work.
The five main CRAAP test criteria are:
In an age of misinformation and fake-news, the ability to evaluate the quality of the information we find has never been more important.
Currency: the timeliness of the information
Relevancy: the importance of the information for your needs
Accuracy: the reliability and correctness of the content
Authority: the source of the information
Purpose: the reason the information exists
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