Approximate completion time 1 hour.

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In legal research, it is often easier to begin with secondary sources rather than plunge directly into the search for primary legal authority on your topic. You may want to use secondary sources to find a summary of an area of law, to scope out a legal field to identify more precise topics for your research, and/or as a way to find (through citations) specific references to primary authority that is relevant to your research.

This lesson covers two of the most important external finding tools--periodicals indexes and library catalogs--that you can use to help find secondary sources relevant to your research. In the course of this lesson, you will learn how these tools are organized, and how to use them to identify periodical articles and books on a topic.

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