Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Document Ranking
Basics of Westlaw Searching
Natural Language
When you search using the Natural Language search method, the documents in your search
result will be ranked according to their statistical relevance. The document that has the greatest
likelihood of matching the concepts in your description is displayed first. You will retrieve a
maximum of 100 documents with a Natural Language search.
Terms and Connectors
When you search using the Terms and Connectors search method, the documents you retrieve
are ranked by age or publication, depending on the type of information you are searching.
In age ranking, documents are presented in reverse chronological order (i.e., the most recent
document is displayed first). This is the default ranking order in most databases, but it is not
available in statutory or regulatory databases.
When you search in the All Federal Cases database (ALLFEDS) or a federal topical case law
database using age ranking, cases are ordered first by court and then by age. U.S. Supreme Court
cases are displayed first, followed by cases from the courts of appeals, the district courts, and the
specialized courts (e.g., the bankruptcy courts).
In publication ranking, documents are presented in the order in which they were published. This
ranking order is not available in all databases. It is the standard ranking order in directory
databases as well as statutory and regulatory databases such as the United States Code
Annotated database (USCA) and the Code of Federal Regulations database (CFR).
Modifying Your Search
The result list lists the citations of documents retrieved by your search (Figure 8.9). The result
list enables you to view your search terms in the context of surrounding terms.
Figure 8.9: Result list
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