Legal Research

Proposal for Citation Analysis Research (Noting Up)

By Ted Tjaden

Are any members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries doing any recent bibliometric analysis of case law citation and noting up? I know of several such efforts in the past (see the Research Databank of their Committee to Promote Research).

There is also of course the study done by Greg Wurzer, Aleksandra Zivanovic and Rhonda O’Neill (?Canadian Electronic Citators: An Evaluation of their Accuracy and Efficiency? (2004) 29 Can. L. Libraries Rev. 68) and various citator comparisons done by American colleagues a few years back in the Law Library Journal.

However, I think the time has come with the maturity of CanLII to compare the scope and depth of its case law noter-upper with those on the various commercial databases. Anecdotally, for recent cases, I am finding that CanLII is very close in scope and depth to the major commercial services (however, since I have the luxury of being able to use commercial databases, I still noteup using the commercial services; I also find that the inclusion of secondary content in the citing references on Westlaw Canada to give them a huge advantage for now in this field).

Currently, I am too busy (lazy?) to undertake such an analysis but would find it useful if someone were to carry out this research.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 30, 2010 (boomark / email).