State appellate court opinions are printed in state reporters or regional reporters. 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 statute. Computer databases can be used but are very expensive. Otherwise, digests must be used.
Digests are the traditional means of finding cases.
They are published for most states and several of the regions. There is also a federal digest. 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. This index uses common words to lead to the right topic and key number.