I’d like to draw your attention to a resource called the Oxford Index. It is a free resource available to everyone, and it may have a usefulness beyond the usual legal research sources we are familiar with.
The breadth of online materials on the OUP platforms can be quite difficult to identify easily, because the digital resources vary in format and purpose. Bibliographies and journals and e- monographs covering many subjects and titles can be discovered via Google and other search engines, and there are records in institutional online catalogues. But the introduction of this new free search and discovery portal makes it all so much easier to find what’s there.
The Index searches well over two and a half million abstracts from OUP publications such as essays, journals and chapters from monographs and reference works, and the results provide summaries from the resources identified by the search. The abstracts are very informative, and include chapters within books. It is possible to set up free personalised accounts, so searches can be saved and results bookmarked. Results include related content links, broadening the usefulness of the results.
As subscribers to OUP’s online resources, the result links to the full text of the item irrespective of where it is located within the Oxford contents. The index is not restricted to law, but covers all OUP online subject coverage, so this can also be rewarding, as other types of material may be retrieved that can still be relevant to a query.
And now we come to UPSO. OUP ‘s academic publishing arm provides a wide range of online monographs and journals. A couple of years ago OUP decided to broaden its offering of scholarly titles by bringing together some of the leading University Presses which may not have been able to provide their own online platforms. The aggregated monographs are easily accessible via University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO), with content from the following presses:
The American University in Cairo Press; University of Chicago Press; University of California Press; Edinburgh University Press; University Press of Florida; Fordham University Press; Hong Kong University Press; The University Press of Kentucky; Manchester University Press; Policy Press; and launching this year: Liverpool University Press ; The MIT Press ; Stanford University Press and Yale University Press.
We subscribe to these OUP resources, so the range of resources indexed includes UPSO titles, as well as Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) which contains 886 law titles, all searchable via the index.
OUP’s law database materials, which are mainly in the field of Public International Law, are not included in the Oxford Index search. This includes the Max Planck Encyclopaedia of International Law and the Oxford Law Reports on International Law. Both these have their own search interfaces on their home page, to search within their content. And don’t forget that updates to the ORIL, via RSS feeds, are free, and may act as a useful alerter to new cases as they are added.