I've been a post-secondary student for almost seven consecutive years now so I feel pretty comfortable saying that I'm familiar with academic research. I did my undergraduate in social psychology which means that most of my research involved various databases that linked to journals my school had subscriptions to and Google. I liked using Google mostly because I already knew how to use it. I would sometimes search for articles on Google, find something I wanted, hit a paywall, and then search for the same article through my university database. Of course, I also came across Google Scholar which was often a lifesaver.
As I entered legal education, I still used university databases and Google scholar for articles but now I had to look for cases and for that we were taught how to use Westlaw and LexisNexis. Searching for case law is a little different than searching for articles. With articles, I could tell from a brief glance at the abstract whether it would be useful or not. Not quite with cases ... I had to consider its authority in regards to jurisdiction and level of court, what the dissenting opinion (if any) was, what qualifications were made, what the specific fact scenario was, which area of law it covered, which other cases it cited and how, and most importantly, if the case had been overruled. And there could be hundreds and hundreds of potentially relevant cases depending on which keywords I put in. As you might have guessed, going on Westlaw and LexisNexis was not exactly my favourite thing to do.
