MRLC Series of Lectures Phrase V “English Document Retrieval in the Study of Law” was Held in Law School of RUC

2015.05.13 - 2015.05.13

At 2:00 pm on May 13rd, 2015, MRLC series of lectures phrase V “English Document Retrieval in the Study of Law” was held in Room 413 of Mingde Main Building of Renmin University. This lecture was held by Associate Professor Meng Yanbei of Renmin Law School, and the Ph.D. students as well as some postgraduates majored in economic law of law school attended this lecture. Ms. Liu Ming, the teacher of Renmin Law School, was the speaker of this lecture.

Ms. Liu Ming started the lecture with the topic of how to retrieve the relevant documents, and then further explained the topic from the aspects of choosing key words, database, field and retrieved result evaluation. Ms. Liu specially pointed out that it’s hard for most of us to get a satisfied retrieved result when retrieving the English document because the key words we choose are usually not the most exact expression in the related field. As to this matter, Ms. Liu provided with the corresponded solution, that is, with the help of using authoritative law dictionaries, like online English-Chinese Dictionary of Anglo-America Law and Black’s Law Dictionary in Westlaw. At the same time, students may search the standard expression by using Google or Wikipedia, or searching the expression in available documents, or browsing the natural language retrieved results in Westlaw and Lexis. Moreover, Ms. Liu believed that the most difficult to find in document retrieval is the first message. She conducted retrieval with the example of “psychopath gives evidence”, and further explained various ways of getting information by positioning the key words of the context, adopting synonym replacement and paying attention to annotation. Afterwards, Ms.Liu gave a presentation of the characteristics and usage of database like web of science-SSCI, westlaw, heinonline, Ebsco, Jstor and Kluwerlaw. Meanwhile, she gave a detailed introduction of the features of common database like westlaw, heinonline and Duxiu knowledge base. All these introductions gave the students a more direct and clear understanding of the features of various databases.

In the second part of the lecture, Ms. Liu specially gave an introduction of how to retrieve the major documents and trace the frontier academics. She took the SSCI database for instance, and demonstrated how to screen and refine the retrieved result by selecting the types of the documents, authors and peer review. Through the ranks of times cited could also help get the main documents with more relevant and higher academic influence. Besides, Ms. Liu introduced the function of establishment, trace and service of various databases, and by taking advantage of this function can achieve the frontier trace of the relevant subjects and scientific projects.

In this lecture, the participated students operated their own computers with Ms. Liu’s instruction, and gained a better understanding of how to retrieve the English documents by using various databases in practice. The students present expressed that they had learned a lot by attending this lecture, and their abilities to retrieve the documents had made great progress. All these experiences will do great help to their future’s academic document retrieval and paper writing.