Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Chapter 12
Citation Research on Westlaw
Finding the law is only the beginning of legal research; citation research helps you check the status of
the law, expand your research, and update your work. This chapter describes Westlaw services and
search techniques that will help you quickly and easily perform citation research that is
comprehensive, current, and accurate.
KeyCite
Westlaw service or search technique Description
KeyCite
KeyCite Alert
Table of Authorities
WestCheck.com
WestCiteLink
KeyCite is the citation research service available exclusively on Westlaw. KeyCite can assist you with
every step of the research process. KeyCite provides information such as the following:
■ direct appellate history of a case or administrative decision
■ negative citing references for a case or administrative decision
KeyCite helps you quickly determine whether a case, statute,
administrative decision, or regulation is good law and retrieve
citing references.
KeyCite Alert lets you set up entries to automatically monitor
the status of cases, statutes, administrative decisions, and
regulations and sends you updates when their KeyCite
information changes.
The Table of Authorities service lists the cases cited by a case
and shows whether those cases have significant negative history.
WestCheck.com is West’s citation research application on the
Web that enables you to verify citations in a word-processing
document, such as a brief, or in a list of citations.
WestCiteLink creates hypertext links from legal citations in
your documents to the full text of the cited documents on
Westlaw.
■ citations to cases, administrative materials, secondary sources, and briefs and other court
documents on Westlaw that have cited a case, statute, administrative decision, regulation,
American Law Reports (ALR) annotation, law review article, or patent
■ complete integration with the West Key Number System so that you can track legal issues discussed
in a case
Winning Research Skills 143