The following tools allow you to search for journal articles and case comments on your topic in hundreds of journals at the same time. These resources are either indexing/abstracting tools or full-text databases. Note that many of the indexing/abstracting tools listed below link to the full-text articles.
Indexing/abstracting tools are the most effective and efficient way to find relevant scholarly law journal articles, as the databases are searched by title, keyword, subject and abstract etc, rather than the full-text of the articles, so the results are more relevant.
When searching in full-text databases, your keywords may appear anywhere in the article, so you will get far more results, many of which will not be relevant, unless you construct searches using proximity operators, for example.
To find journal articles about South African law, we recommend searching in the following South African and multijurisdictional databases:
South African Law Journals Index
iSALPI: South African Legal Periodicals Index from the Library of the Constitutional Court of SA. Can be searched, or browsed by topic, author, article title or date. Indexes articles from South African journals only. No full text.
Journal Article Index (Johannesburg Bar Library) (open access) has a sophisticated search engine. Indexes articles from South African journals only. No full text.
Multidisciplinary African and South African Journals Index
Sabinet Advanced Search - see information above.
Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) South Africa contains numerous full text open access journals, mainly in the sciences, but also some arts, social sciences and 'human sciences' journals, including a few law journals. It has a fairly basic article search engine - no boolean searching, but it does allow field searching, so you can search in eg: title, abstract and subject fields.
Sabinet includes two open access full-text collections:
Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals on HeinOnline
AGIS Plus Text on the INFORMIT platform
index / abstracts
Australasian articles
over 140 journals indexed
coverage: mid 1980s to current
HeinOnline Law Journal Library
full text
multijurisdictional
over 2300 journals and law reviews - full text
coverage: from the first issue published for every journal to current
Index to Legal Periodicals on the EBSCO platform
index/abstracts
multijurisdictional - US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
over 1100 law journals and reviews, yearbooks, bar association and university publications indexed; full text of over 480 journals
coverage: early 1980s to current
Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1908-1981 on the EBSCO platform
index / abstracts
multijurisdictional - US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
over 400 journals indexed
coverage: 1908-1981
Legal Journals Index on Westlaw UK
index/abstracts
UK and EU articles
over 800 journals indexed; full-text coverage of approximately 100 journals
coverage: mid 1980s to current
index (no abstracts provided)
multijurisdictional - US, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia
over 875 law journals indexed; and law-related articles from more than 1000 additional business and general interest periodicals
coverage: mid 1980s to current
Index to Canadian Legal Literature on WestlawNext Canada
index
coverage: 1985 to current
Articles and Newsletters on WestlawNext Canada
full text
over 40 Canadian law journals and reviews, approximately 20 Law Report articles that contain case comments, annotations and articles (coverage 1970s to current) and 20 newsletters
coverage: 1990s to current
All Canadian Legal Journals on Lexis+ Australia
full text
approximately 45 Canadian law journals
coverage: 1989 to current
SSRN via the Legal Scholarship Network provides forthcoming articles, unpublished working papers in addition to published articles, book chapters and other law research outputs.
full text
multijurisdictional