Nexis is a very powerful tool that can search across the full-text of news articles, court dockets, and business resources. How you put your search together is very important to finding the information for your analysis. Nexis' Boolean logic uses terms called connectors to limit, widen, and refine your search results. The below connectors can help you develop your search query so you get the most relevant materials for your corpus.
- AND – finds all terms
- & – finds all terms
- OR – finds any or all terms
- /n – finds terms in proximity to each other (n can be any number)
- near/n – finds terms in proximity to each other (n can be any number)
- pre/n – finds terms in ordered proximity (n can be any number)
- +n – finds terms in ordered proximity (n can be any number)
- /s – finds terms approximately in the same sentence
- /p – finds terms approximately in the same paragraph
- /seg – finds terms approximately in the same document segment
- AND NOT – excludes terms from your results
- but not – excludes terms from your results
- % – excludes terms from your results
- not /n, not pre/n, not /s, or not /p – finds terms not in proximity to other terms (n can be any number)
Like in math's order of operations, the order of connectors matters too. In Nexis, the order connectors follows is:
- or
- /n, +n, not /n
- /s, +s
- /p, +p
- and
- and not, but not
Nexis provides a very detailed page with more information on searching and how to use the connectors.
