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Nexis Uni: Advanced Search

A guide to using the Nexis Uni database.

Advanced Search

Image showing Nexis Uni's Advanced Search box.Click to enlarge image

Nexis Uni Advanced Search allows you to build a more specific search by providing multiple search boxes, search fields, date ranges, sources, and content types. Change the search field with the drop-down menu to the right of the search box. Select a date range from the drop-down menu. List sources to search within in the "Sources" box. You can also switch from searching "All" content types to searching for "News," "Company and Financial," or "Legal" above the search box.   

Search Tips

  • Choose specific terms that are closely related to your research topic, including terms you might use when discussing your topic with a colleague such as jargon, synonyms, and abbreviations.
  • Nexis Uni searches are not case sensitive. 
  • Nexis Uni automatically finds variant spellings of words. 
  • Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase (e.g. "Roe v. Wade") 
  • Use Boolean operators to limit, broaden, or eliminate terms from your search:
    • AND limits search results, finding articles with both terms 
    • OR broadens results, finding articles with either term 
    • AND NOT eliminates terms from the results, finding articles with one term but not the other 
  • Use truncation and wildcards to broaden your search:
    • An exclamation point (!) truncates the end of a word, finding variant endings. Nexis Uni only allows for truncation at the end of a term (e.g. judge! for judge, judges, judgement, etc.), never within or at the beginning. 
    • An asterisk (*) replaces one or zero characters, finding variant spellings and endings (e.g. colo*r for color and colour). Nexis Uni allows wildcards within a term as well as at the end of a term. 
  • Use proximity operators to make a search more specific:
    • WITHIN # WORDS OF or W/# denotes how far apart you want your search terms to appear (e.g. jury W/3 trial for the two terms to show up within 3 terms of each other in the search results. 
    • PRE/# or P/# denotes how far apart you want one search term to appear before a second term (e.g. jury PRE/3 trial for the term 'jury' to appear 3 terms before 'trial'). PRE/# is different from W/# as it specifies which term you want to appear first in the search results.