Reports are not arranged by subject, nor are the sets indexed. Often a reference may be found from text or footnotes of texts, encyclopedias, or other cases. Annotated Codes will list cases which have cited a statute following the text of the statutes. Lawyers and law schools can find cases using computer databases, though these are expensive and may not be available to the public. Otherwise, digests must be used.
Digests are the traditional means of finding cases once the above have been tried.
Digests are published for most states and several of the regions that correspond to the regional reporters. There is also a federal digest, and an American Digest that covers all jurisdictions in ten-year increments. The most commonly used digest system divides the law into about 400 topics. Pigeonholed under each key number are brief paragraphs abstracted from cases, which summarize what each case says about that point, and citations to where each case can be found. It is possible to go directly to the topic in the digest and scan through the key numbers, but it is usually less confusing to start in the Descriptive Word Index to the digest.