Little Overlap in Legal Research Database Results

Robert Ambrogi wrote an article earlier this week on the Above the Law blog entitled Legal Research Services Vary Widely in Results, Study Finds.

It is a useful reminder that no one database covers everything the legal researcher needs:

"Different legal research platforms deliver surprisingly different results. In fact, in a comparison of six leading research providers, there was hardly any overlap in the cases that appeared in the top-10 results returned by each database."

"This startling finding is the result of research performed by Susan Nevelow Mart, director of the law library and associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, where she teaches advanced legal research and analysis and environmental legal research. Mart has published a draft of her research paper, The Algorithm as a Human Artifact: Implications for Legal {Re} Search, and she presented some of her findings in a program I attended at the recent annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries."