Begin transcript:
Visual: Nexis Uni homepage.
Narration: Hello, everyone. My name is Taylor Leigh and I am the Liaison Librarian to the School of Public Policy and Administration here at Walden. In this short video, I’m going to briefly introduce you to the Nexis Uni database. Nexis Uni is designed as the replacement for another database, LexisNexis Academic. It’s going to continue to provide access to all of the content in LexisNexis Academic but with greater functionality and user-friendliness. This database is primarily for legal and business information. It contains all three kinds of laws—statutory, regulatory, and case law—as well a law reviews and journals, case notes and briefs, news articles, company information, and more.
This is the homepage of Nexis Uni and the first thing I want to show you is up here on the top left you see this drop-down menu. You can actually change the homepage to be more tailored to your primary field of interest. We have pages for Business, Criminal Justice, and Political Science. This is going to allow you to follow recent news on your topic or recent legislative activity, or key topics. Again, it just offers a more tailored experience. I like to leave mine set to the general home page.
Here you see the main search bar of Nexis Uni and the great thing about this search is that it will recognize both natural language and Boolean operators. So, it’s going to be a much more intuitive search than many other databases that force you to use those Boolean operators. You can see over here on the right, it’s going to default to look for your keywords in All of Nexis Uni, and this is really useful if you are searching for a variety of information on a particular law, for example, because it’s going to give you all different kinds of content related to that law. You can type in a citation here or the popular name of a law or any other keywords you have and search in All of Nexis Uni.
Visual: Drop-down menu to the right of the main search bar.
Narration: You can also change this drop-down menu. We come down here and we see this first tab for Category, and here you can limit to Cases or Statutes and Legislation, Law Reviews and Journals, among other things. You can come over here to Jurisdiction and tell it exactly which jurisdiction you’re interested in. You can come over here to Practice Areas and Topics, this is a great place to go if you are just browsing for information on a topic within legal research. Finally, you can come over here to Recents and Favorites and it will show you where you have been most recently.
Visual: Advanced Search screen.
Narration: That’s the main search feature, but we can also go to this Advanced Search, and that is located just below that main search bar. If we go here, we see another drop-down menu, “Select a specific content type,” and if we open that up, we are going to see all of those categories that we just saw, plus many more, so that allows you to be that much more specific when you are searching.
For our sample search, I’m going to select Law reviews and Journals, and I’m going to type in “public spending.”
Visual: Results page.
Narration: This is what the Results page is going to look like. If we come into one of our results, we click on it, you’re going to see this option right here to Copy your citation, you click on that and easily copy and paste the citation into your list of works cited. You can also see where it highlights your search terms in the content of the document. There is a feature up here that allows you to search within this document for any additional keywords you’d like to use. There is, along here, this toolbar, all different kinds of options of how you can save results. You can save to Google Drive or save to Dropbox, among other thigs. You can also set up folders, now these are going to be personalized folders, so you’ll have to create a free account in Nexis Uni before you can do this, but once you do, you can create multiple folders for different projects. It’s a really easy way to keep track of everything you’ve found.
Visual: Back to Nexis Uni homepage.
Narration: I’m just going to hop back over here to the homepage again. I just want to show you this “Get A Doc Assistance.” This is another way to search. If we click on that, you can see that we can search By Citation, and we can specify a Content Type, we can enter in one or both names of a given case, or we can search by docket number, if you have that information.
Finally, I wanted to show you this “Let us help you find it” feature. This is yet another way to search within Nexis Uni. So, as you can see, it asks you what you’re interested in, you can select News, Cases, Law Reviews. If you select Cases, it’s going to ask you about the jurisdiction, and then, over here in the About box, you’ll enter in any search terms you have and you can limit by date, and search that way.
Another feature I wanted to point out is, from this homepage, you can go up here to History. This is going to show you where you’ve been most recently, much like that Recent tab we saw earlier. So you can see the most recent searches you’ve done and the most recent documents that you’ve viewed. And if you come back to Nexis Uni after watching this short video and have any questions, I definitely recommend clicking on one of these two links to see if you can resolve your issue. One is this Help link right here up at the top. And another is this Tips link, which is located just below that main search bar. These links, the pages they take you to, are going to contain everything that I’ve mentioned, plus much, much more. They have some great guides and tutorials, and a lot of other great instructional content on how to search in this database. And, of course, you are always welcome to contact us at the Library using the Ask a Librarian tool on the Library’s homepage. So, that’s it for me. Thanks for watching and happy researching!
Created October 2017 by Walden University Library
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