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NEXISREFERENCE GUIDE
Mairin Van ShuraGovernment Consultant
Searching for News and Company Information on Nexis.com
***Please note that this guide is intended to be an introduction to searching news and company information on Nexis.com and is by no means all-inclusive. For more information, please consult your local LexisNexis government consultant.
SIGN IN TO NEXIS.COM
1. Go to http://www.nexis.com
2. Enter your nexis.com® user IDand password.
3. Click Sign In.
To begin a news search, click “search” andthe red “news” tab.
For a quick news search, use the guided form, filling in as much or as little information as you want. Use the drop down menus to indicate where in
your document results you want your search terms to appear.
For example, if you want “election” to appear in the headline of each of your results, type “election” in the first terms box and choose “in headline” from the drop down menu. Enter
each additional term you would like to appear in your results set in the remaining search boxes. Indicate where you want the terms to appear by selecting the appropriate option
from the drop down menu.
ELECTION
Choose “In Headline”
Tech!
advance
Census
data collection
accuracy
Let’s say we want to quickly search for articles discussing whether new technological advances will improve the
accuracy of Census data collection.
The “!” is a root expander. Placing it at the end of the word “tech” indicates thatwe want Nexis to search for all words beginning with “tech.” This saves us from having to input “technical,” “technology,” “technological,” etc. into our search form.
If we decided that data collection and accuracy were not mandatory terms, meaning we just needed one of the terms but not necessarily both terms to appear in our results, we would change “and” in the drop down menu to “or.”
“News, Most Recent 90 Days” is the default source for the guided news search form because this type of search is intended to be a quick search of recent news.
After you hit the “search” button, you will be taken to a results page. On the left-hand side, your results are
grouped according to source type. Here, we only searched news from the past 90 days, so all of our results are news sources. To see exactly which news sources our results
come from, we can hit the expand button next to one of our results categories.
Once we expand “Aggregate News Sources” and “Guidelines & Notices,” we see that three of our results
are from the ASAPII Database and three are General Accounting Office Reports.
To sort results alphabetically, click here.
On the left side of the results set:
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1. Add additional terms you would like to appear in your results and Nexis will search within your original results set for the additional term. This is usually the most effective way of narrowing your results.
Right side of results set
2. To save this search or create a new search, click this drop-down menu and choose the appropriate task.
3. To receive an e-mail when new results matching your search criteria arise, click “create an alert.”
4. If you want to see an abbreviated results set with just the titles of your documents (and the source from which they are derived), choose “list.” You can also choose “full” to see the full document of each of your results, instead of clicking on the title of the document to see it in its entirety (which you would do in expanded list mode).
5. Your search terms appear in blue so you can quickly see how relevant a document is to your search
criteria.
Navigate to the next document in your results set
Your search terms appear in red
Navigate to the next section of the document where one of your search terms appears
Keep track of where you have been
SAMPLE RESULT
Let’s say that instead of using the guided News Search form, you want to selectyour own sources.
1. After returning to the start page, click the “Sources” tab.
2. Let’s first choose “Browse Sources.”
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1. You can browse by each of these categories. Clicking on each option re-populates the folders at the bottom of the page as each option provides a different selection of sources to browse.
2. Once you have selected which category to browse by, you can filter sources by country, language, etc. For example, if you only wanted articles that are written in English, choose “English” from the language drop down menu.
3. Double-click on a folder to view the sources contained within that category.
After filtering by English and double-clicking on the “General News Sources” folder, we see that there are 1898 sources within this folder.
To find out what is contained within a source, how often it is updated or how far back the database of this particular source goes, click the blue “i” button.
NOTE:
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1. To select a particular source, click the empty box next to the source name.
2. Each source you select will appear in the “Selected Sources” box to the right of the screen.
3. To save a group of sources for future searches, select a name for the group and click “save as favorite.” Once you name and save the group, this group will always be available under the sources drop down menu on the main search form. As an example, I typed “Random News” and saved it as a favorite.
4. If you only want to search one source, click the title of the source, and you will automatically be taken to a search screen for that source.
Random News
After hitting “OK-Continue,” I am taken to the Power Search screen to enter my search terms and/or parameters. Note that the source group I saved as a favorite, “Random News,” appears in the Sources drop down menu. To choose a different source group,
scroll through the drop down menu. Nexis has preloaded several useful source groups, including “All News, All Languages,” “The New York Times,” “Government Publications
and Documents,” etc. to expedite your research.
Choose “Natural Language” for “plain English” searching. Choose “Terms and Connectors” for Boolean searching.
As a comparison, let’s run the same search in Natural Language format.
Previously, we used the Guided Search Form under the “News” tab.
Make sure “Natural Language” is selected.
Input your “plain English” search.
Choose “News, Most Recent 90 Days” from the “Sources” drop down menu.
Our Natural Language search produced considerably more results (the terms and connectors search we did using the Guided Search form only produced six results). This disparity between the two searches highlights the
difference between natural language and terms and connectors searching. With a natural language search, results are produced according to relevancy of the document to the specified search terms. In contrast, in a terms and
connectors search, the user chooses exactly which terms must appear in their results and where the terms must appear. As a result, Terms and Connectors searches generally produce a smaller results set than Natural
Language searches.
SEARCHING COMPANY INFORMATION ON NEXIS
From the start screen, select the “Company” tab.
To get a quick snapshot of a company (short biography, chief executives, assets and liabilities, etc.), type a company’s name in the box above. As an example, I
entered Starbucks and hit “search.”
Starbucks
Nexis gives us the top three results of our company search. For this example, I will choose the first listing, the Starbucks Corporation. Clicking on the first
option will give us a quick overview of Starbucks, including important financial and key competitor information. This “snapshot” will also allow us to link to
corporate hierarchy information, legal information and in depth financial information.
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1. Additional links to subsidiary information, legal information and financial information, among others.
2. Biographical information, including company’s Ticker and Dun & Bradstreet numbers, HQ address and link to the company website.
3. SIC and NAICS codes with links to all classifications.
4. Link to additional stock/financial information. Each source where data is culled from is hyperlinked; clicking on the source will provide additional information from that source. Also, charts such as this Stock Quotes chart above, can be downloaded directly into Microsoft Excel.
Return to the Company Dossier start page by clicking at the top right hand corner of the screen.
Notice the tasks listed on the left of the screen. The most commonly performed tasks and most commonly used sources (SEC Filings and Dun & Bradstreet Profiles) are located on the Company Dossier start page to make your research more efficient, especially for Nexis novices. You can begin your research project right from the start page, without having to click around Dossier.
To create a list of companies meeting certain criteria of your choosing (number of employees,
annual revenue, etc.), click here.
To search just public companies, or alternatively, just private companies, use the drop down menu to make your selection.
To search by SIC Code or NAICS Code, if you know the Code, simply type it into the corresponding box. If you do not know the appropriate code, click on the hyperlink to the right of your search box to search by keyword or browse the SIC or NAICS Division Structure.
Expand the drop down menu for several different keyword searches to narrow your results.
Let’s complete an example. Sticking with the Starbucks theme, let’s say we want to create a list of coffee companies.
1. First, I need to use the SIC Code Lookup feature to find the SIC Code for coffee.
Now I can input the appropriate SIC Code in my “Create a Company List” form.
Add as much or as little information as you like to tailor your company list. For this example, I specified Sales/Revenue needed to be above 100,00,000, added the SIC Code, and
kept the default settings for everything else.
Our search produced 179 results. To customize our company list further, click “Next: Customize” and check the corresponding box for the category you would like included in your
company list (see below) and then click “Update Company List.”
Nexis will now build a list of companies meeting all of your criteria. This list and all of the information contained within can easily be downloaded into Microsoft Excel by clicking the “Download Selected Items” button. If you
want to download some companies from the list, but not all, just unclick the box next to the company you do not want included.
To save this search or customize it further, click the appropriate button in the upright corner of your screen.
Once you have compiled a list of companies, you can easily profile any of these companies to learn more information about them.
Return to company searches and from the left side of the screen, select “Company Profiles.”
Enter company.Starbucks
Narrow results by keyword.
Select a source.
For more information on a particular source, click the blue ‘i.”
Your results are organized just like a Nexis news search; results groups are divided into categories on the left side of the screen and your results are hyperlinked and listed on the right side. The number in parentheses
following a category name indicates the number of results included within that category (see red circles below).
View your prior actions to reach this result set through your “trail” in the upper left hand corner. Customize your results list, search within your
results or create an alert, just like our Nexis news search.
For more information at any time, return to the company searches start page and consult the “How do I…?” section on the left of your screen. If you want to brush up on your skills or would like a quick Dossier refresher, you can view tutorials covering company searches and other tasks by selecting “view tutorials.”
