Shepard's Citations

The name comes from a service begun by Frank Shepard (1848–1900) in 1873 which published citations in a series of books for different jurisdictions. Under William Guthrie Packard, the company continued to grow. It moved to Colorado Springs in 1948; in 1951, it adopted the name Shepard's Citations, Inc. In 1966, ''Shepard's Citations'' was acquired by McGraw Hill. In 1996, ''Shepard's'' was purchased by Times Mirror and Reed Elsevier (owner of LexisNexis since 1994). In 1998, LexisNexis bought full ownership of Shepard's. After this acquisition, LexisNexis engaged in a "multi-million-dollar Citations Redesign (CR) project" that "redesigned the way we process case law and citations". ==Decline of print usage==

In March 1999, LexisNexis released an online version, named ''Shepard's Citation Service. While print versions of Shepard's'' remain in use, their use is declining. Although learning to Shepardize in print was once a rite of passage for all first-year law students, ''Shepard's in paper format consists of long tables of citations (with full case titles omitted) preceded by one or two-letter codes indicating their relationship to the case being Shepardized. Before computer-assisted legal research became widely available, generations of lawyers (and law clerks and assistants) had to manually locate the Shepard's entry for a case, decipher all the cryptic abbreviations, then manually retrieve all the cases that were marked by Shepard's'' as criticizing or overruling a particular case, to determine whether the later cases had directly overruled that particular case on the specific holding of interest to one's client. In many jurisdictions in the U.S., it is still possible to cite a case as good law even though it has been overruled, as long as it was overruled on another holding and not the specific holding for which it is being cited. Another flaw with the ''Shepard's'' paper format is that it was published in the form of hardcover books. These books were cumulative only through the date of publication, which posed the problem of how to add new citations after the original publication date. In the 10th edition released in 2015, that section was replaced with a brief explanation that such "detail is unnecessary for the many researchers who have access to one or more online citators". It was followed by a recommendation that researchers without access to an online citator should telephone or email LexisNexis directly for assistance. ==Online==

LexisNexis and Lexis Advance database users can Shepardize most citations online; cases are displayed with a text link to Shepardize the case and usually also have an icon indicating the status of the case as citable authority. Either the text link or the icon, when clicked or activated, will bring up a full ''Shepard's'' report for the case. The ''Shepard's report indicates exactly how later cases cited the case being Shepardized with plain English phrases like "followed by" or "overruled" rather than by using the old abbreviations. Additionally, the report shows the full case title (that is, the names of the plaintiff and defendant) and full citation for each of the later cases. This is important because lawyers can usually distinguish criminal from civil cases by looking at the title. Criminal cases (with the exception of habeas corpus cases) are always titled U.S. v. [defendant], People v. [defendant], or State v. [defendant]''. Often, a criminal case may cite a civil case for a point of law which a civil litigator does not care about, and vice versa. Finally, the online report has the convenience of allowing the user to simply click on the hyperlink for any listed case to retrieve it almost instantly (if it is within the user's access plan), whereas users of ''Shepard's'' print version had to dash through long law library aisles to retrieve heavy legal reporter volumes, one for each case (and then someone had to put all those volumes back). While most citations can be Shepardized online, there are some sources that are only Shepardizable in the print ''Shepard's Citations volumes. Most significant among these are the uncodified United States Statutes at Large, which are treated in the print publication Shepard's Federal Statute Citations but are not Shepardizable online. There are other more specialized sources not as widely used as the Statutes at Large that are included in print Shepard's Citations'' publications, but not included in the online service. ==Influences upon Science Citation Index and Google==

In 1960, Eugene Garfield developed Science Citation Index (SCI), which he later expressly acknowledged was heavily influenced in several ways by ''Shepard's Citations''. SCI indexes scientific journal articles, and shows what other articles they have been cited by. SCI also counts the number of citations each article gets, thus forming a citation index of the most-cited articles and journals. In turn, SCI inspired several other scientists to research the possibility of developing superior citation indexes. Examples are the eigenvalue-based method developed by Gabriel Pinski and Francis Narin in 1976 and the PageRank link analysis algorithm using the similar idea created by Sergei Brin and Larry Page, which became the heart of the Google search engine. ==References==