Strengthening Your Data Science Program? See How a Self-Service Data Discovery & Analysis Solution Like Nexis® Data Lab for Academic Helps

Data scientists represent one of the most in-demand careers today. As Towards Data Science noted earlier this year, demand for data science jobs has climbed 650% in the past decade. It’s a key driver behind the growth of Data Science programs at universities across the country—and there’s no sign of a slowdown. “To be a successful company in the 21st century,” said the article, “you have to use data to your advantage.” The old school approach of analyzing spreadsheets is rapidly being replaced by programming languages that enable fast, in-depth analysis and data visualization tools that help tell the stories in the data. Now, universities can give budding data scientists precisely these types of tools with the new Nexis^® Data Lab for Academic.

4 great reasons to choose Nexis Data Lab for your university

When it comes to great content for academic research, librarians, faculty, and students all know the Nexis name. Our award-winning academic research platform, Nexis Uni™, is a go-to source of comprehensive news, business, and legal information. Now, the extensive current and archival news data found in Nexis Uni can be tapped for deeper analysis with Nexis Data Lab. That’s a reason on its own, but we’ve got six more incentives to give Nexis Data Lab a try.

1. Metadata enhances data discovery. Data doesn’t lend itself to research without some work. Typically, data scientists spend a good portion of their day wrangling data to make it more useable. Our own data process is unmatched in the industry. In addition to normalizing data into a semi-structured format, our data goes through our proprietary LexisNexis® SmartIndexing Technology™ which classifies and tags articles based on more than 7,000 index terms related to subjects, industries, companies, organizations, people, and places. In our research platforms, these enhancements and pre- and post-search filters allow students to drill down to the most relevant results. Nexis Data Lab benefits from this metadata as well, allowing students to move beyond the discovery phase more quickly.
2. Fast access to data. Acquiring datasets for analysis via traditional API solutions can take days or even weeks. (And don’t forget the wrangling if it is raw data.) Nexis Data Lab puts enriched data at students’ fingertips—no hosting required. From their individual workspace, students can use the best-in-class, open-source Jupyter computational notebook to combine software code, results, explanatory text, and multimedia resources in a single document. They can also return to saved searches to refine them or to conduct further analysis.
3. A self-serve model simplifies registration and saves time. With an easy registration process for user IDs, librarians can spend less time on administrating access to Nexis Data Lab. This self-service approach extends to the user experience as well. Nexis Data Lab offers pre-packaged and open-source notebook libraries, making it easy to get started for students at the beginning of their academic journey. Students with more experience can modify the libraries or create and embed their own code. Plus, users can import third-party data into their notebooks to compare against their Nexis Data Lab research.
4. Review results your way. Unlocking insights from thousands of documents and millions of data points can be a challenge. With both text- or graphic-based analysis tools built into Nexis Data Lab, students and faculty can go from data dump to data insights quickly. Data visualizations can also be exported for use in reports and presentations. What’s more, Nexis Data Lab makes it export analysis, notebook code and document manifests to the users laptop, allowing students and faculty to refine, ratify and reproduce results—whether it is for a class report or for peer review for publication in an academic journal.

Why not explore the potential for yourself? Check out the Data Lab features now or speak with your Nexis Solutions representative about a trial.