Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. Although the name is trademarked, it is also used informally by legal professionals to describe citators in general—for example, Westlaw's similar tool called Key Cite.
The name derives from a legal service begun by Frank Shepard (1848–1902) in 1873, when Shepard began publishing these lists in a series of books indexed to different jurisdictions. Initially, the product was called Shepard’s Adhesive Annotations. The citations were printed on gummed, perforated sheets, which could be divided and pasted onto pages of case law. Known as “stickers,” these were literally torn to bits and stuck to pertinent margins of case reporters.
By the early 20th century, the Frank Shepard Company was binding the citations into maroon volumes with Shepard’s Citations stamped in gold on their spines, much like the ones still found on library shelves.
Under the leadership of William Guthrie Packard, the company endured the Great Depression and 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" which "redesigned the way we process case law and citations."