Below you can find information and tips about searching in Nexis Uni in three parts:
Search from the home page
From the homepage you can easily search Nexis Uni. By default you search in 'All Nexis Uni'. Click on the box left of the search bar to select a particular set of sources to search in, for example 'News'. In the search bar you can enter search terms, but also sources (such as specific newspapers) that you can use as a filter. Watch the video below to learn how to do this.
Filter and sort
Within the results you can further filter and sort.
Useful filters are the 'timeline' (date range), place of publication (anything outside the US can be reached by filtering multiple times from 'International'), language, sources (i.e. specific newspapers and media), and people mentioned.
Above the results, you can enable the 'group similar documents' function, which ensures that duplicate and very similar articles only appear once in your results list.
In the advanced search screen you can search more specifically for news sources.
First select the 'news' tab at the top.
You can combine search terms in various ways with so-called 'connectors'. See the list at the bottom of this page (box 'advanced search techniques'). To the right of the search bars you can indicate in which part of the article (title, headline and subheading, etc.) you want the search terms to appear.
You can also apply certain filters, such as a date range, length of the article (word count), language and specific newspapers.
Quotation marks
If you put search terms in quotes, they should appear next to each other in your results in that exact order. This way you can search for fixed word combinations. Searching for "social media" prevents you from finding articles that say ‘media’ somewhere, and the word ‘social’ further down.
Boolean operators
The boolean operators AND, OR and AND NOT allow you to combine search terms in different ways. You place them between your search terms.
AND
AND is used to indicate that both search terms should appear in your results, for example:
You will then get results in which both Trump and corona are mentioned.
OR
You use OR when both search terms do not necessarily have to appear in the search results. You can use it to include multiple synonyms in your search.
You will find results in which only 'corona' is mentioned, only 'COVID-19', or both.
AND NOT
AND NOT excludes search terms. If you use multiple operators in your search, put AND NOT last.
In this example, you will find articles in which 'virus' is mentioned, but not 'corona'.
Order of operators
If you use multiple boolean operators, you can use parentheses to indicate which terms belong together. What is in parentheses is processed together.
Here you will find articles about Trump and corona and/or Bolsonaro and corona.
In this example, you will find articles about Bolsonaro and corona, or about Trump.
Proximity connectors
With proximity connectors you indicate how close words should be to each other in the articles. The number indicates how many words your terms can be separated from each other.
In this case you will find articles in which the word 'Trump' is no more than five words away from 'Bolsonaro'.
At least
With 'at least' you can indicate how often a word should appear in your results.
In this example, you will find articles that contain the word 'Denmark' at least eight times. This way you can be sure that the country is not just mentioned in passing, but is actually discussed. Instead of 8, you can enter any number here.
Wildcards
With wildcards (* ?) you can find word variants.
Using the asterisk, you replace different word endings. With this search, you will find 'library', but also 'libraries' and 'librarian'.
The question mark is a kind of joker, with which you replace one letter in the word. In the example above you will find both 'woman' and 'women'.
