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“Being prepared is about anticipating what comes next and getting ready for it,” writes Tony Rea in What They Don’t Teach You in Sales School. It’s a concept that resonates here at Nexis Solutions too. Our commitment to developing innovative academic solutions starts with gathering feedback from librarians, faculty members and students. This enables us to optimize tools like Nexis Uni—or launch fresh solutions like Nexis® Data Lab— to deliver the experiences and results users need to move ahead in their academic and future careers. Let’s take a closer look at some of the enhancements made to Nexis Uni this year.
The disruption experienced over the course of 2020 and 2021 may have been unprecedented, but it certainly emphasized the need for universities to empower learning—anywhere, any time—with intuitive, cloud-based solutions. Nexis Uni already delivers on that need, from the initial self-registration process that lets students personalize their research experiences to the built-in collaboration tools that enable group projects in a virtual environment.
Librarians and faculty know all to well that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is a perpetual challenge when it comes to keeping college students on track with content research. The Nexis Uni Widget makes it easy to embed a search widget directly on the library home page or within research guides. In turn, convenient access reminds students to take advantage of a platform designed for academic research rather than falling back on familiar search tools more suited to shopping than scholarship.
Conducting research requires a variety of skills, and according to Carnegie Mellon University's Eberly Center on Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation, students often don’t arrive on campus (or to virtual classrooms) equipped with the right knowledge and skillsets. What’s more, students are often unaware of their shortcomings because they’ve grown up relying on Google and Wikipedia to serve their academic research needs.
But what suffices in high school doesn’t meet the standards of higher education. Recognizing this, Nexis Uni received enhancements to its Advanced Search capabilities, starting with simplified source type selection.
While students can still search all content types at once, the simplified source type selection options—All, News, Company and Financial, or Legal—give them a convenient way to narrow search parameters instantly. Need to conduct news research? Just select ‘News’ as the source type. Researching the regulatory landscape? Select ‘Legal’ as the source type and drill down to the Regulation Tracking subset.
Boolean search is a term that librarians, faculty, and more experienced students already know. For less experienced researchers, Boolean might as well be a foreign language. They far more accustomed to natural language queries on the open web. Nexis Uni makes creating a Boolean search more intuitive. In addition to adding search terms, students can select from several Proximity Connectors, Term Connectors, and Search Fields. This enables students to learn Boolean as they go. By choosing between different connectors, students can see how search results shift. Students can also see how selecting different Search Fields can refine results to only content that features the search term in the Headline and Lead Paragraphs or articles that feature a specific journalist’s Byline.
Nexis Uni already features 15,000+ sources, but as researchers needs change, our dedicated Content team remains focused on expanding our source universe further. Significant additions include:
Learning gaps can be particularly pronounced among immigrant and international students. With its built-in Google Translate feature and new Language Pre-Search Filter—not to mention global news sources—Nexis Uni offers greater flexibility for students who may be more comfortable conducting research in their native language before reporting on results in English.
Want to know more about Nexis Uni enhancements in 2021 … and what’s in store for the future? Download our enhancements guide today.