Oftentimes your topic will have interdisciplinary aspects, including non-legal analytical frameworks. You may need to explore schoalrship in other disciplines using tools such as:
- Academic Search Complete and JSTOR - two general-purpose multidisciplinary article databases.
- Social Sciences Citation Index - includes indexing and citation-tracing features for many social sciences articles and books; good for finding "cited by" information for non-legal framework papers.
- Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts) - capstone projects by advanced degree candidates are not usually considered part of the core literature in a given discipline, but can offer interesting analytical frameworks, a model of extended analysis and methodology in a non-legal / non-doctrinal topic, and citations to grounding literature.
- Also use the A-Z Databases finder to look for core resources (in the "Recommended!" box) for a particular discipline or subject area (e.g., Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies).
- Google Scholar - by nature a cross-disciplinary search, results using this search engine may help you understand the overall landscape of scholarship in an unfamiliar discipline, and point you to particular fields, authors, or terms of art; this search engine is also useful for citation-tracing that goes beyond the realm of traditional legal scholarship covered by Lexis, Westlaw, and Hein Online.
UCB has access to many, many databases. You should spend some time perusing the databases (by subject or by type - e.g., articles, news, statistics and numeric data, etc.) if you are researching an interdisciplinary topic.
