About HeinOnline in the United States

HeinOnline is an international database that provides searchable full text access to numerous legal sources. The database contains full text e-books, US and core international journals, treaties, statutes and cases all in PDF format, which is useful for working out the original pagination. HeinOnline, produced by the William S. Hein Company, includes the vast majority of the entire United States law review literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its search tool retrieved virtually all
of the over 1.4 million articles in that database.

HeinOnline, though wonderfully comprehensive in its coverage of law reviews published by law schools, omits some of the legal journals published by university presses, learned societies, and commercial entities.

Searching and Browsing
If the reader wants to search a given collection make sure to click on the search tab. HeinOnline defaults to citation navagator tab – which is only useful if you have a specific citation. The search tab is the next one on the left.

There are a number of different search options and the “about searching” information on the search tab in any HeinOnline Library gives comprehensive advice on how best to search that part of Hein. The options are described below. There are links to PDF how-to guides on the search tab page.

Search results

The results page shows your search statement, the total number of results, and the list in relevance order, unless you specified otherwise. You can change your existing search by using the Modify your Search option or you can add extra keywords and search within your results set be selecting search within these results.

Scholar Check enables you to quickly locate other articles in Hein that have cited the one you are reading.  This can be useful to find additional related reading or possibly alternative opinions on your topic. Clicking on the Scholar check link will bring up the list of citing references.

Printing/Downloading

1. When you are looking at the document in HeinOnline, you will see a printer icon at top right, next to a magnifying glass. The icon is for print or download.
2. Click on the printer image – you’ll now see a pop-up screen.
3. Choose one of the options – print/download the entire document, or just a few pages.
4. The pop-up screen will then show the document in PDF.
5. To download for saving, use the browser’s File option, choose ‘Save as’, choose a location and a file name, and the document will be saved as a PDF file.

HeinOnline has only modest coverage of social science journals.

Hein Online and citations

The search tool permits the legal researcher to use the ability of HeinOnline to sort its articles by “Number of Times Cited” to generate citation totals that are both more thorough and more accurate than any previous counts.

HeinOnline in the Context of Law Research

The Thurgood Marshall School of Law Library defined briefly HeinOnline as: A database containing page images and searchable text of retrospective legal journals and other legal materials. Hein-On-Line is provided by the William S. Hein & Co., Inc.Legal research resources, including HeinOnline, help to identify the law that governs an activity and to find materials that explain that law.