LexisNexis Makeover: Meet Nexis Uni

The news, business and legal database we know and love has recently undergone a major face lift.  What was formerly called “LexisNexis Academic” is now Nexis Uni—with a new, and hopefully more intuitive, interface.

Click on images for a larger view.

Nexis Uni Home Search Options

Nexis Uni Home: Search Options

The new look and feel begins with the Nexis Uni home page, where you have several options for constructing a search.  The large Search box at the top of the screen is quite versatile and is a good place to start if you are not sure exactly what you are looking for.  As you type, Nexis Uni will make suggestions that you can use to add limiters or terms to your search.  Enter a natural language string such as What efforts has the fast food industry made to use recyclable packages?  Or, try a more precise query using “connectors” (Boolean operators).  Clicking on the “All Nexis Uni” link to the right of the search bar, you get additional options for narrowing your search by Category, Jurisdiction, Practice Areas & Topics, or Recent & Favorites.

Looking for a little more guidance? 

  • If you find the main search bar overwhelming, try the “let us help you find it” search area just below.  Selecting Cases, for example, will provide you with search limiters specific to that document type.
  • Select one of the new Discipline Pages (Business, Criminal Justice, and Political Science, with more to be added) to just retrieve results specific to a discipline.
  • Some additional useful features in the Advanced Search section include the ability to restrict your search to specific sections of a document (Headline and Lead, Title, Byline, etc.), and to search by ticker symbol (for company/financial information).
  • Want to retrieve specific documents by citation, party name, or docket number?  Use the Get a Doc Assistance feature, also on the homepage.

Once you have your search results you can:

  • Toggle between source types (Cases, News, Law Reviews & Journals, etc.) to look at different subsets of your results and to access different filters.
  • Search within your results using keywords.
  • Print, email or download selected results—or save them directly to Google Drive.
  • Create a Nexis Uni profile and save documents to Dropbox, save searches, create alerts, and share folders.
Nexis Uni Search Results Page

Nexis Uni Search Results Page

 

There is much more to the Nexis Uni database than can be covered in one post, so stay tuned for additional highlights on this blog.  Video tutorials for Nexis Uni are available on YouTube.

See the library’s A-Z Databases list for a description of this database’s contents.  If you are new to the LexisNexis information universe and would like more information, you can contact your subject librarian.

Nexis Uni is brought to you by the CUNY Office of Library Services.

About the Author

Adriana Palmer works in the Collections Department at the GC Library.