 Hi, this is Mary Wisner from the Gallagher Law Library at the University of Washington School of Law. Today I'm going to talk to you about managing your results with the tip of using different ways to sort to improve your browsing. Now, you run a search and you get a list of results. What do you do now? Well, one approach is to read the first document carefully and take notes on it. Then read the second document carefully and take notes on it. Then read the third document carefully and take notes on this. And keep doing this until you're absolutely out of time. Or sort, skim, and choose the documents that you want to read more carefully. Now I recommend this approach. Most online systems default to sorting by relevance, and they determine relevance by some algorithm that their programmers have written. And we don't always know what that algorithm is. And in fact, if you try the same search on different systems, you're going to find that, say, Westlaw's programmers have a different algorithm than Lexis's programmers, so they tell you different cases are relevant. But they give you other options. Most systems will let you sort by date or most cited. If you're looking at cases, they'll give you level of court. The options vary by database. So for instance, you have different options for law review articles than you do for cases. Here's an example. Searching for cases in Westlaw, I looked for write to counsel in the same sentence as wave, waiver, waving, in the same sentence as knowing or knowingly. Remember the exclamation point truncates a word. This is in US Supreme Court cases, so I have 40 cases. Sorted by relevance, their first case is Michigan versus Harvey. Now when I sorted it by most cited, the top case is Miranda versus Arizona. Now if you've ever watched Law and Order, you know that this is a case you really should be considering if you're thinking about waiver of the right to counsel. So that sort by most cited was very helpful. When you're looking at by date, our first case is one that was decided in 2010. These are the options you have when you're looking at cases in Westlaw, relevance, date, most cited, most used, court level, and term frequency. Let's look at law reviews in Westlaw. We see that there we have different options for sorting, relevance, date, and most cited. In statutes and court rules, our options are relevance, most cited, and sorting by order of table of contents. You can change your defaults in preferences. Up in the upper right-hand corner of every Westlaw screen, there's a little icon that ... Anyway, you click that, and you get to preferences. One of the preferences is search, and under search, you can change your default sort order. Let's turn to Lexus. I searched for commerce clause within the same paragraph as interstate, within the same paragraph as regulator, regulation, and so on. Sorted by relevance, the top case is Gonzales versus Rach. Sorted by date, the top case is Tennessee Wine and Spirits retailers versus Thomas. They give us a lot of options, relevance, document title, jurisdiction, court, date, so that we can choose to sort in different ways. In law reviews in Lexus, we have a choice of document title, content, jurisdiction, date. I'm not quite sure what they mean by content. I experimented a little bit and didn't find anything useful, but relevance and date are definitely useful. In Lexus, you can change your default settings. In the upper right corner of the screen, there's the word more. Under more, you have an option for settings, and then once you click on settings, one of the options is the default sort by. Turning out a Bloomberg law, if we search for cases, in this instance, I looked for a confrontation clause within 20 words of hearsay in Ninth Circuit courts in the last five years. Sorting by relevance, the top case is United States versus Gonzales. We have options to sort by date, court, most cited, or relevance. Bloomberg is really strong in their newsletters, so I ran a search in Bloomberg Law News for cannabis and bank, banker, banking. This will also pick up bankruptcy, but I'm mostly interested in banking. And here's an article about cannabis regulation, state banking legislation, and our options for sorting are date and relevance. Bloomberg is also really strong for dockets, so I ran a search looking for amazon.com as a party, and I find I can sort by date, court, or relevance. Finally, let's look at law reviews in Heinon Line. I searched for Blue Book to be in the title of an article. The relevance sort gives me two articles by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, but I could also sort by date, looking at the oldest or the newest, number of times cited by articles, number of times cited by cases, most cited author, so I have different options for sorting. What's the point of all this? Sorting in different ways helps you choose cases that are likely to be important to you. Recent cases, or articles, are important to show current thinking, and they will cite the important older cases. Most cited cases, or articles, have been deemed to be important by others, so take a look. Take advantage of the relevance rankings that the algorithms give you, but don't rely on them exclusively. Try looking at the other sorts. This has been Mary Wissner from the Gallagher Law Library. See our website for library services, research guides, and more.