Nexis®
Nexis® is our online aggregator of general news, journals, directories, and company and industry information, with four billion searchable documents from 36,000 international sources.
We have listed a few tips and tricks below to facilitate your research within Nexis.com:
- Search broadly - if your search is as broad as possible and your date range is not too limited, you will not need to go back and either edit or rerun it with extra terms. If your broad search returns more results than you want, you can use the 'Search within results’ box (which creates no further usage) and you can return to the full set at any point.
- When looking for a person's name, follow this example:
Bad search: Richard Branson
Good search: Richard w/2 Branson (Richard within 2 words of Branson)
This will not only look for 'Richard Branson' but also 'Richard Moneybags Branson'; 'Richard Anthony Branson'; ‘Richard Daredevil Branson' etc.
- If your results return a lot of irrelevant articles (e.g. you are looking for the businessman Richard Branson but you get a lot of articles referring to the Reverend Richard Branson) don't use Edit and change your search - go to the 'Search within results' box and type 'Branson and not reverend'.
- Use as specific a source as possible. The smaller the source, the fewer royalties are required.
- If looking for all the recent news about online banking (who the key players are, what it is worth each year, what the security issues are etc.) you need to be aware that your search needs to allow for a number of phrases:
Bad search: online banking
Bad search: online banking or internet banking
Good search: online or internet w/2 bank!
The good search will now look for 'internet bank'; 'internet banking'; 'banking on the internet'; 'online and telephone banking'; 'online banks' etc.