For those who like to conduct a quick Google Scholar search for case law or articles, you can add a Scholar Button to the Firefox and/or Chrome browsers’ bar. This allows you to launch the Google Scholar search box right from your browser bar without typing the URL.

After the Google Scholar button is installed, click the button that is now located on your browser bar (see next image). The default Google Scholar search is set for articles, so if you want to change the default to case law, click on the gear icon (see next image) at the bottom right to deploy the Scholar settings page.

On the Scholar Settings page (see next image), click into the radio button labeled “Search case law.” Then, under “Collections,” click into the “Search case law” radio button. That change will switch the database to be searched from journal articles to case law.

There are other settings you can adjust on the Scholar Settings page. For example:

• Google Scholar defaults to showing 10 results (and Google claims this provides the fastest results) but under “Results per page,” you can change this to 20 results;
• Beneath the section labeled, “Where results open,” you can click into the “Open each selected result in a new browser window” radio button. This allows you to view each result in a different tab, but whether we clicked into this radio button or not, each result always opened in a different tab;
• Another choice on the Settings page is the section labeled Bibliography manager.”  You can choose “Don’t show any citation import links” or “Show links to import citations into” one of the following: BibTex, EndNote, RefMan, or RefWorks.

To save all your new settings, remember to click the blue “Save” tab in the lower right-hand corner of the Settings page. To retain these settings forever and to deploy them on any device that you use, you must be in your Google account and turn on Cookies.

After you enter your search terms into the Search box, your search results will be displayed in a drop down list.

Note that even after you changed the search default from articles to case law search, it still refers to articles, but as you can see, these are case law results. Click the case name to view the full case or click on the large quotation mark on the right. If you click on the large quotation mark, the case’s Bluebook citation is displayed (see next image) and four bibliography manager tabs are displayed (see next image).  If you wanted to enter a citation into one of the bibliography managers, you would need to have already downloaded it.

While the Google Scholar button is a quick way to search for case law or articles, some of you might prefer to conduct an “Advanced Scholar Search: to narrow your results.

The Advanced Search allows you to search by various criteria, as shown in the next image. Next month, we’ll publish a free excerpt from The Cybersleuth’s Guide to the Internet, by Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch, which explains how to use the Advanced Search menu. Stay tuned.