Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Nexis Uni

Formerly “LexisNexis Academic”

Bloomberg Law

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about Bloomberg entering the legal research market in competition with LexisNexis and Westlaw.  The Journal says this is only one product in Bloomberg’s push away from the “terminal.” Other products in the pipeline are a data service for the sports industry and one that covers the interactions of government and business.  Read the article “Bloomberg hangs a new shingle” in the July 8, 2010 issue.

Finding U.S. Supreme Court decisions with a dissenting opinion

When I came to the desk today a student asked for help in finding all U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the past 10 years in which there was a dissenting opinion or dissenting opinion.  It turned out that the student needed only one U.S. Supreme Court decision in which there was a dissenting opinion for a presentation in a class.

(Dissenting opinions are when the court is not unanimous in its decision.  A 9-0 decision means there is no dissent, although if there is a vacancy on the court, it could be 8-0.  There are many decisions in which there is a dissent.  A judge may dissent in whole or in part from a decision, and other justices may or may not join the dissent, in whole or in part.)

To find all the decisions with dissents, we went to Westlaw campus, selected U.S. Supreme Court decisions and limited the time to the last ten years.  Then we added dissenting as a keyword.   This resulted in 648 decisions.   You can look at the decision and there is a brief summary of the case and then which justice wrote the majority decision and which justices wrote dissenting opinions, and if other justices joined them in whole or in part.

On Lexis Nexis, the same type of search can be done but the longest time period was 5 years.  This resulted in  328 decisions.

I asked the student if there were a subject he was interested in and he said privacy.

So we did a new search, with the limits mentioned before, and added privacy as a keyword and dissent or dissenting.  There were 32 results, which is much more manageable for the student.

Legal materials added to Google Scholar

Resource Shelf covers the addition of legal materials to Google Scholar at http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/11/17/federal-and-state-legal-opinions-along-with-patent-info-added-to-google-scholar/ .  The advanced search option allows targeted searching by jurisdiction and type of document (federal or state case, patent, article).   As noted by Resource Shelf, many  of these materials are already available on the web (Justia offers federal cases linked to Pacer dockets and there are several free sources for patents, including the U.S. Patent Office) but now  these materials are part of the Google Scholar database.   Google Scholar is also linking to materials (e.g. law review articles)  in propriety databases, including Lexis and HeinOnline.

Assignment re Katharine Graham

In doing email reference today several students have either chatted or emailed about their communications assignment to find articles about Katharine Graham and her son Donald E. Graham, who have been publishers of the Washington Post.  (Mrs. Graham, now deceased,  took over after her husband’s suicide, and her son succeeded her, after holding several positions at the Washington Post.   Mrs. Graham was the publisher of the Washington Post during the Watergate crisis in the early 1970s.  John Mitchell, the attorney general at the time, made a very famous quote about Mrs. Graham.)   One student was misspelling Mrs. Graham’s first name, which might have been problematic in searching the databases.

I was somewhat surprised when I tried Academic Search Complete and the Communications database and learned if you do a people search or subject search  for Katharine Graham  no results are available.  A search in all text is successful.  There are a number of articles about her after she died.    Another database that can be searched is People on Lexis-Nexis, which has a number of results for either Katharine Graham or Donald E. Graham.   Her son is also referred to as Don Graham sometimes.  Two books, one written by Katharine Graham, are available in our collection.

New York Times access

I was teaching a couple of sections of English 2100 yesterday, and the professor wanted the students to search for newspaper articles, among other things. When they find articles in databases like Academic Search Premier, the “Find It” link brings them to a Factiva or Lexis Nexis search page. I was able to help them get what they needed, but they were confused when they came to another search box. Have other people encountered this? I know we can search the Times directly, but it would be helpful for the students if the link brought them to the article.

Databases for Surveys and Polls

I have an email question from a faculty member about surveys and polls in Lexis Nexis. She wrote that there used to be more surveys and polls there, but they seem to be gone now.  I saw that the Gallup polls are there, but she said there used to be more than that.

Frank and Linda suggested the ICPSR and Tablebase databases as other places she could go. Does anyone else have suggestions?