Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Nexis Uni

Formerly “LexisNexis Academic”

Removal of New York State Newspapers Database

The database link for New York State Newspapers has been removed from our database pages. Recent changes from Gale had left the New York State Newspapers database with just one paper in it, The New York Times, which we already have full text access to within many other Gale databases as well as within ones from ProQuest, Factiva, and Nexis Uni.

If you want to limit a search to just newspapers from New York state, that can be done within Nexis Uni (after running a news search, use the “Location” option in the “Narrow by” section on the left).

Searching for Negative Business News

Both Factiva and NexisUni offer searchers easy access to negative news stories. In NexisUni you can narrow your search results to Negative News using the filters on the left of the results page. Run your news search, then select the Negative News filter. It will narrow your results to articles that contain negative or critical information about a person or a company. The results can be overwhelming so you might want to search within the results or limit by publication.

Factiva has pre-built searches for narrowing a search for news sentiment, either positive or negative. Set up your search on a person or company or industry and then click on Factiva Expert Search in the search options to choose “News Sentiment”.  The News Sentiment category is further subdivided by Negative News- Corporate, Negative News – People, Negative News – Political, and Negative News for various industry sectors. Make your choice by opening the plus sign to select English language. (You must select a language to add the category to your search).

Factiva Expert Searches are pre-defined search strings created by Factiva search experts to find not only News Sentiment but news on topics and subjects that are often difficult for searchers to compose on their own. Thought leadership, customer service, digital analytics, investor sentiment, and institutional investor risk are some of the topics in Expert Search. There are also a limited number of “Trending Topics” like Brexit.

Fix Coming This Week for Linking Problems in Gale Virtual Reference Library and Nexis Uni

Later this week, there should be a fix in place for the problems we’ve been seeing over the past few months with Gale Virtual Reference Library and Nexis Uni. This problem always starts with OneSearch records. When the user clicks the “full text available” link for some (but not all) records that are supposed to lead into Gale Virtual Reference Library entries or into Nexis Uni, the user is led to various dead ends.

Gale dead ends

  • a login page from Gale that looks like this one (users should only ever see our remote access login page, and that should only come up when they are off campus)
  • a remote access login page from another CUNY campus
  • a Gale page saying the item can’t be found

Nexis Uni dead ends

  • a login page from Lexis Advance (which we don’t even subscribe to)

Workarounds

Until the fix is in place this week, users should take note of the info from the OneSearch record for the item they want, go to our A-Z databases page, find the link for either Gale Virtual Reference Library or Nexis Uni, connect to the appropriate database, and re-run the search for that specific item.

About the Fix

The source of the problems lay in the updates made by Ex Libris to holdings info about Gale resources and Nexis Uni resources in the SFX system (a system that you also see when you encounter a “Find it! @ CUNY” button in a database record. When you click the “full text available” links in OneSearch, that action uses SFX to figure out what database has the full text and takes you directly from OneSearch to the item in the database (in some cases, the link takes to you to the search page for the database). Ex Libris is fixing errors it made in the way SFX translates incoming requests for full text linking for Gale and Nexis Uni resources into a URL made on the fly that transports the user into the appropriate database. CUNY OLS will apply this fix to our SFX server this week, and we should see the problems disappear thereafter.

LexisNexis Academic Is Now Called Nexis Uni

LexisNexis is shutting down its LexisNexis Academic platform this month and migrating us over to the new Nexis Uni interface. There is now a link to “Nexis Uni” on the A-Z databases page. The existing link for “LexisNexis Academic” has been relabeled as “LexisNexis Academic is now Nexis Uni” and redirected to point to the Nexis Uni interface; we’ll leave this set of dual links in place for the rest of the year.

If you’d like to dive in to the documentation from LexisNexis about the new interface, try these:

If you’ve got links to LexisNexis in a LibGuide you authored and you re-used the official database link, it will automatically get updated to the new URL. If, though, you have typed out in text somewhere on your guide the name “LexisNexis” you will want to change that to “Nexis Uni.” Here is a search in the LibGuides system of all pages where the word “Lexis” appears. Please review these search results and update any mentions of LexisNexis to reflect the new name, Nexis Uni.

 

LexisNexis Is Very Eager for Our Feedback on the “New” Platform

Yesterday, Harry and I met briefly with the LexisNexis rep who got us set up on the beta version of the new platform. The rep was very eager to have us give him feedback on the platform, which is really the corporate version of “Nexis.” There are some notable things to be aware of with this platform:

  1. The platform is branded “Nexis.” It’s not clear if that is what the company will go with in the. If we feel that the name should remain “LexisNexis Academic” or at least “LexisNexis,” this is our moment to let the company know.
  2. There is some content and features on that are only temporarily there: the public records content and the “my documents” feature. These aren’t intended to be a part of the final version of this platform.

LexisNexis Academic--beta version of Nexis platform

Please email me or Mike Waldman with any feedback you have (or post comments here).

Beta Testing the Forthcoming LexisNexis Academic Platform

LexisNexis is asking us for feedback on the new platform that we’ll be moving to later this year. I’ve added a second LexisNexis Academic link to the A-Z databases page. The link to the beta version is clearly labeled as such:

LexisNexis Academic--link to beta version

 

There is also a link to this beta version on the Trials tab of the databases page.

I’m planning to send news of this beta version to the journalism department faculty for feedback. Any comments I get will get passed on to LexisNexis. Feel free to forward your comments or comments you’ve gotten from faculty you work with to Mike Waldman or me.

LexisNexis Academic offers latest GMI ratings on companies

While doing some company research recently, I realized that Lexis-Nexis Academic, a database available through the Newman Library, offers the most recent GMI ratings on companies, including environmental, social, governance, litigation, and accounting-related risk indicators.

Two ways to locate the ratings are: Select GMI Ratings in the Source Directory on Lexis-Nexis Academic (listed in the databases on the Newman Library homepage)  and then search by the company names or ticker symbols that you need.  The ratings report  will be listed for each company.  The second way, is to search by ticker or company name in the “Get Company Info” box.  In the left column of results, click Analyst Reports.  The GMI Rating, if there is one, will be listed.  Click on the link for the full report.  Lexis-Nexis offers an explanation of the ratings, including the date, which is the date that rating was published.

One may access Lexis-Nexis Academic off campus and on as a Baruch student, faculty or staff.  Other CUNY libraries have access to Lexis-Nexis Academic.

The  Newman Library also has GMI ratings, available for a number of years and indicators, through the WRDS databases.  However, the coverage we have available through WRDS does not include the environmental, social, litigation and accounting-related risk factors.  Some accounting and governance information is available through WRDS.  Access to WRDS through the Newman Library is limited to current Baruch students, faculty and staff.

Results Sorting in LexisNexis Academic Is Borked

If you run a search in LexisNexis Academic and try to sort the results from newest to oldest, you’ll see that the results aren’t in the order that you requested (or any order). Sorting from oldest to newest seems to work, as does relevance sorting (as far as I can tell). According to a post today on ERIL-L mailing list, LexisNexis is aware of this problem and a fix for it may not come until May (ugh).

LexisNexis and Firefox Problem (fixed 22 January 2014)

If you are at one of the PCs at the front of the reference desk and try to open LexisNexis in Firefox, you’ll see that the lower half of the search screen is missing:

LexisNexis in Firefox

 

I’ve reported this problem to the BCTC Help Desk (ticket # 24353). My sense is that Firefox on these machines needs to be updated. If you encounter this problem at the desk, just switch over to Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.

22 Jan. 2014 update: BCTC has now fixed this problem