HeinOnine Introduces Drill-Down Citation Indexing and Linking to It's Law Journal Library

HeinOnline is introducing a new feature to help researchers assess the relative influence of law review articles based on citation frequency. Start with a topic search in the law journal library. Results will display the number of times each retrieved article has been cited by other law review articles in HeinOnline. From there, select the citation list for a cited article because you can drill down into that search subset to perform a case name search. From there, you can view the cases in articles that cite the influential article you selected to research. Check out HeinOnline's screencast. Hat tip to Jan Novak and her Cleveland-Marshall Law Library's very good CM Law Library Blog.

The Power of Persistence. Back in 1980, I sat in a meeting with Bill Hein and a technologist from the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute in Chicago. Bill was describing what he wanted to do to digitize his product line and provide access to digital collections. At the time, the media under discussion was "video disk" technology. The hurdle was the sad state of OCR software applied to imaged text. I left the meeting thinking that even if the issues were resolved, online vendors like Lexis would so dominate the market that Bill's investment in time and financial resources would end up being a net loss to his company's bottom line. Here's another great HeinOnline service that proved me wrong.

Just a personal note of appreciation for Bill's persistence. His vision and his company's employees are providing options that one supposedly bright young thing just out of an forward-looking IT-oriented library school thought, "this ain't gonna fly." [JH]