The new Shepard's also allows free text searching of a results set that enables narrowing down of results to particular facts. Westlaw has plans to match these developments. Proposed innovations include KeyCite for Statutes which will indicate whether a statute has been amended or repealed and include information regarding pending legislation. There may also be KeyCite Alert, a clipping service that will provide notification when new cases cite a particular case. This association of ideas represented by a single citation means a citator can be seen as a type of information retrieval system.
Information scientists refer to bibliographic couplings and co-citation analysis.
This approach has been used for the indexing and analysis of scientific literature. Nevertheless their combinations of free text searching and relevance analysis have created tools that are more powerful than their hard copy relations. A critical legal theorist would argue that the existence of citators creates a more conservative judiciary. The convenience of the tool and the durability of the format encourage judges to slavishly follow previous decisions. This combined with the new utility of online citators will undo the old mechanics.