Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Using the Citation Field
Retrieving a Document on Westlaw by Citation or Title
Certain documents—such as historical statutes and regulations—cannot be retrieved using Find.
When you have a citation to such a document, access the appropriate database and retrieve the
document by restricting your search to the citation field (ci). The citation field is the part of a
document containing citations for that document. When you restrict your search to the citation
field, you specify that only that part of a document is searched.
Use this format to restrict your search to the citation field: ci followed by the term or terms in
parentheses. Do not include the publication abbreviation. When your citation consists of two or
more numbers, the components of a citation field search are as follows:
the field to which you are
restricting your search
title number connector section number
ci (26 +5 1201)
Suppose you want to retrieve the 1993 version of a section of the United States Code Annotated,
e.g., 26 U.S.C.A. § 1201. Access the United States Code Annotated 1993 database (USCA93). At
the database Search page, click the Terms and Connectors tab if that search method is not
already selected. Then type ci(26 +5 1201) in the Search text box and click Search Westlaw.
Compare the following examples of the citation field search format:
Example Analysis Comments
ci(26 +5 1201) Correct This example shows the preferred
format; it retrieves documents in
which the number 26 precedes the
number 1201 by five terms or
fewer in the citation field.
ci(“26 u.s.c.a. 1201”) Inefficient This example retrieves the
document; however, it is not the
preferred format because it
requires you to know the correct
publication abbreviation.
ci(26 u.s.c.a. 1201) Incorrect Westlaw reads any space that is not
within quotation marks as or; this
query would search the citation
field for 26 or u.s.c.a. or 1201.
Winning Research Skills 69