Quick News Search searches all English language news sources within LexisNexis Academic. You can use a quick search to search up to the most recent two years of news sources. To help you obtain more targeted results, the Date dropdown list lets you select a narrower timeframe for your search.

Unlike many other LexisNexis research tools, quick search does not search the full text of documents for your terms. Instead, it searches a specific collection of document segments chosen to bring you the most relevant results. They include the TERMS segment which contains the index terms assigned to that document by the LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology™ process. They also include the HLEAD segment (the first few paragraphs in news articles).

All news sources accessed by the quick search form undergo the indexing process. They are analyzed for subjects discussed, company names found, people mentioned, organization names encountered, and geographical locations identified. When a known term or variation of it is found, the standardized index term for it is placed in a special TERMS segment of the document. This indexing process, which is a combination of software analytical programs and human editor intervention, provides a highly accurate profile of each document.

When you submit your search, all documents within the source categories you select will be searched. Any document containing your search terms in one of the searched document segments (TERMS or HLEAD) will become a candidate. Those candidate documents are then relevance ranked. Relevance ranking is determined by:

• where your terms appear within the document (search terms appearing as LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology terms or in the TERMS or HLEAD segment make the document more relevant),
• how many of your search terms appear in the document, and
• how often those search terms appear throughout the document.

Then, the most relevant of those documents (up to 125) will be retrieved and made available to you for browsing. To help you analyze those retrieved documents, your search terms will be highlighted when the document's text is displayed.

The concept of keyword/index term searching is to specify a few words or phrases that describe your topic of interest. Please note the following:

• Quick Search always assumes an OR relationship between your search terms. That is, documents may contain any of your search terms to become a candidate for retrieval.. Do not attempt to alter this relationship by entering any special commands (AND, OR, W/n, etc.).
• Do not use wildcard characters (* and !) to replace characters within a search term.
• If you want to link two or more words together so that they are treated as a phrase, enclose them in quotation marks.
• Any future answer-set manipulations will be performed on that retrieved set of 1,000 or less documents.