Legal Research

WorldWideScience

By Simon Fodden

From time to time lawyers need to touch base with sub-political reality, and scientific journals offer one way to do that. WorldWideScience is a cooperative venture among 44 countries under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (sigh: I wish I didn’t wish it was run out of Denmark or Korea or Chile) that offers a federated search of the various countries’ databases. Canada’s contribution, for example, is the National Research Council’s Institute for Scientific and Technical Information and Defence Research and Development Canada’s Defence Research Reports.

I ran a simple search for “taxonomy,” which threw up 79 initial results and an offer of 249 more, ranging from a taxonomy of bamboos to a taxonomy of XML document types. You can rank your results in a variety of ways and filter by database source.

The helpful expandable/collapsable sidebar menu, which you see reproduced here, offers you clusters of results by likely topic or by date.

Not all the articles are open access, but according to the FAQ “many are free.”

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 16, 2008 (boomark / email).