JOUR 11200: Investigative Journalism

A top database for news, business and legal research is Nexis Uni.  You can find the database on the library's homepage under the Databases.   You can access it 24/7 by authenticating (sign-in with your Netpass user name and password).  It is recommended that you create a personal account so you can more readily save your research.

Nexis Uni (replaces LexisNexis) 

From Cathy Michael

• How to search for news using segment searches (February 2021)

From LexisNexis:

• Steps to Self Register 
  Trouble Shooting: If you are trying to Self Register (upper right of the screen) and are not seeing the Registration button (should appear on the right half of the screen), try either reloading the website (it may take a couple times), or, try opening it in an incognito browsing window. The user name and password you select does not have to be the same as Netpass; if it is, it will remain the same and not update when your Netpass changes. 
• Searching (from the Nexis Uni platform). Includes videos and text instructions

Use a ? to find variations of a word
Use a question mark (?) to find variations of a word by replacing characters anywhere in the word, except the first character.  Use one question mark for each character you wish to replace.  Example: wom?n would find woman and women ;  p??erson would find both the ea and the ie spelling of the name

Using * or an ! to find variations of a word
Use an asterisk (*) or an exclamation mark (!) to find a root word plus all the words made by adding letters to the end of it.
Example: Employ* would find variations on the term employ such as employee, employer, employment, and their plurals
Tip: Use * only to find unique roots: fir! will find fired, firing and fires but will also find words which you may not want (ex. firment)
You can use an exclamation mark (!) in place of the * if you wish.  Both function in the same way but there must be at least 3 characters in from of the ! or you might receive unexpected results

If you click on the Help screen in the Nexis Uni interface, search the term segment to find field codes/segments you can search; search the term proximity to find a list of proximity operators you can use to search.  I've highlighted segments & operators that I use most often further down on this page.

You can search fields by typing the section and then the search term in parenthesis. ex. city(Philadelphia)

Byline: In newspaper articles, this section contains the name of the person identified as the author. When searching journals or other publications, you would use the "author" section.
Company: Particularly useful when looking for SEC filings, this is simply the company name.
Headline: In newspaper articles, this section contains all headings and subheadings of the article. When searching journals or other publications, you would use the "title" section.
Hlead: In newspaper articles, this section contains the headline, highlight, and lead sections. When searching journals or other publications, you would use the "title" section.
Length: A numerical value and arithmetically searchable. This section will show the number of words in an article. For example, if you want to make sure that all of your results are full-length articles, try LENGTH(>500).
Publication: Contains the copyright and publication name.
Publication-Type:  News, Transcripts, Wires, etc.  
​Section: This section contains the section and subsection of a document as well as the volume, issue, and page number.
Terms:  This section searches all of the indexing terms / sub-segments

Note:  certain segments were dropped in Spring 2018 with the change of platform to Nexis Uni.   The following were dropped as they are now a post search filtering option: country, date, geographic, industry and language.

Tips from LexisNexis:

Using the W/n Connector  Use the W/n connector to find documents with search words that appear within "n" words of each other. The value of "n" can be any number up to 255.  ex. william w/3 hearst
Using the W/p (Within Paragraph) Connector Use the W/p connector to find documents with search words that appear within the same paragraph. You may also use W/p when you want your search words to have a general relationship to each other. ex. rule 11 W/p sanction
Using the W/s (Within Sentence) Connector Use the W/s connector to find documents with search words that appear within the same sentence. You may also use W/s when you want a close relationship between words without specifying an exact proximity. ex. sanction W/s frivolous
Using the ATLEAST Command   Use ATLEAST to require that a word or words appear ‘at least’ so many times in a document. Use ATLEAST when you want only documents that contain an in-depth discussion on a topic rather than just a mention. ex. atleast10(cercla)
Note: use this when searching law reviews or broadcast transcripts.