You can use Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg just like Google, entering your terms into a search box. And just like Google, sometimes your results will be great and sometimes they will be useless.
When your plain language results are not good, try the terms and connectors explained below. If you are researching whether you have a right to privacy to your facebook password if your employer asks for it, you could do a plain language search - right to privacy to facebook password if employer asks .
Or, you could do a terms and connectors search - “social media” or facebook /p priva! and employ! .
Explanation of this terms and connectors search:
- or - use when you want either term to appear in the documents you retrieve - so you would get documents that mention facebook or "social media". The or connector is best used for synonyms or terms used interchangeably like Facebook and social media.
- ! - use when you want to get different forms of a word - so with employ! you would get employ, employer, employee, employed and with priva! you would get privacy, private
- /p - use when you want your terms to appear in the same paragraph - so you would get documents that have the terms facebook and some form of privacy in the same paragraph - so if you used facebook /s priva! you would get facebook in the same sentence as some form of priva!
- /s - use when you want your terms to appear in the same sentence
- and - use when you want both terms to appear in the documents you retrieve - so you would get documents that have some form of employ and some form of privacy
- " " - use quotations to get a phrase like "social media"
So, the search “social media” or facebook /p priva! and employ! would look for the phrase "social media" or the term facebook within the same paragraph as privacy / private and the term employ/employer / employee / employed would have to appear somewhere in the document.
