Checking a Citation

Use the following LexisNexis® services and features to check citations and verify cases. Click on a link below to read more about checking a citation.

The Shepard's® Citations Service

The Shepard's® Table of Authorities

The Auto-Cite® Service

The LEXCITE® Feature

The Shepard's® Citations Service

The Shepard's® Citations Service provides you with the tools you need to determine the usefulness and validity of legal documents for your research, as well as to find additional supportive documents. The Shepard's Citations Service combines Shepard's thorough information and analysis with the speed and ease of electronic legal research. The service provides a comprehensive report of the cases, statutes, secondary sources, and annotations that cite your authority, including more recent cases that rely on your starting case. You can then use this report to quickly validate your research and ensure you have good law. You'll find:

• parallel citations to a case
  
  
• case history
  
  
• citations to a case
  
  
• editorial analysis of a case
  
  
• treatment of a case
  
  
• citations from law reviews, bar journals, annotations, and legal treatises
  
  

If you do not know an exact citation format, you can click the Citation Formats link on the Shepard's "Enter the Citation to be Checked" form to launch a series of forms that help you locate the proper format and enter the correct citation for your research.

The Shepard's® Table of Authorities

The Shepard's table of authorities provides another tool to help you determine the validity and usefulness of a legal document for your legal research. Shepardizing™ a case tells you its subsequent treatment; generating a Shepard's table of authorities for the case tells you the subsequent treatment of each of the cited references supporting the case. Generating a Shepard's table of authorities gives you the same result as Shepardizing each cited reference, but instantly.

If you do not know an exact citation format, you can click the Citation Formats link on the Shepard's table of authorities' "Enter the Citation to be Checked" form to launch a series of forms that help you locate a proper citation format and enter the correct citation for your research.

The Auto-Cite® Service

The Auto-Cite® service lets you verify the accuracy of the citation of a case. The Auto-Cite service also provides a check on a case's value as a precedent, and lets you conduct

• cite checking to confirm the case name, jurisdiction, and year of decision, plus identify all official citations to a case
  
  
• case verification to examine (in chronological order) the subsequent history of a case, both appellate and treatment, that may affect its value as a precedent
  
  
• integrated research to review the prior history of a case, identify citations to which it makes negative reference, and find related annotations from and Lawyers' Edition, 2d
  
  

The LEXCITE® Feature

The LEXCITE® feature lets you search the LexisNexis research system case law sources for all references to a case law citation, including parallel citation references, and id. and supra references. The LEXCITE feature retrieves the full text of the referencing cases, so you can view the citation in context. Use the LEXCITE feature when you

• know the citation for a case, agency decision, law review article, or Federal Register document
  
  
• want to find references to parallel citations as well as the original cite
  
  
• want to see the citation in context
  
  
• want to find the most current references to your citation, or restrict references to a specific date range