Hacks for Extracting Relevant Insights from the Nexis® Research Platform

As with other areas of business, the “business” of conducting research changed significantly since the advent of the internet. Yet despite the numerous and varied advantages afforded by cloud research platforms, info pros still struggle to achieve research zen—that is, the ability to filter out the noise and focus on the meaningful—because the digital universe grows larger every day.

Whether you’re vetting a potential M&A target, gathering competitive intelligence to inform strategies across the business or digging for details for an investigative journalism piece, finding relevant information quickly is a must. This on-demand webinar uses real-world search examples to demonstrate how the powerful features in the Nexis® research platform help you accelerate your time to insights.  Want a sneak preview? Read on for a few of the tips that are shared.

4 Ways to Narrow & Organize Nexis Research Results

With Nexis, starting a search is simple. Type your search terms in the big red search box to search across all available content types in a single click or select pre-search filters (by content set, recent or favorite sources) to conduct the broadest search possible across date ranges, languages, and geographies. Nexis also enables you to build more complex queries using Boolean operators from the Power Search tab. But you can also save time and effort by narrowing your initial simple search parameters with post search filters.

Tip 1:  Take advantage of the Timeline filter

The Timeline filter allows you to understand when the person, company or topic of your search began trending and quickly see the dynamics of coverage over time. As you narrow results within the timeline, it helps you identify the context behind that coverage. Because keywords and relevant terms are highlighted in the documents, you can quickly scan search results to better understand the circumstances surrounding news coverage.

Tip 2: Make use of Segments & Commands

Once you have results from your initial query, you can also narrow results by using Segment Commands to search within results. For instance, you can search for a person across News content in the byline or guest segment to understand where that individual is producing and/or participating in content generation. Or, you can focus in on articles from a specific publisher using the pub-copyright segment. Get the full list of Segment Commands by checking out the webinar.

Tip 3: Annotate to highlight relevance in the moment

When you’re heads-down conducting research, the reason you select specific documents from your search results may be obvious. But when you’re juggling multiple demands on a daily basis, what was obvious in the moment, may be obscured by the passage of time. Nexis gives you the ability to quickly highlight and add annotations to documents, providing a quick reminder as to the document’s relevance.

Tip 4: Support collaboration with shared folders & alerts

The information you uncover can lead to insights that improve decision making, but only if it lands on the right desks. By creating folders to organize your research results, you make it easier to collaborate with other Nexis users across your business. And because you can save your searches in the folder, users can see the search parameters that were used, as well as any highlights or annotations you’ve added to specific documents, so they understand the full picture.

Want more search hacks? Watch the on-demand webinar and download the full Segment Commands list and Q&A responses from the live webinar event at your convenience. Afterwards, check out our schedule of upcoming webinars for more expert tips and tricks that will help you get maximum value from Nexis.