Elsevier Full-Text Journals: You Asked ... and LexisNexis® Delivered
By Carol Barra
When I started working with LexisNexis, I got a frequent request from the librarians with whom I worked: Why aren’t Elsevier publications available to search on lexis.com® in full text?” The next sentence was always, “You’re owned by the same company!”
Well I am happy to report that Elsevier full-text journals are being added to lexis.com and are available to search in full text. Plus you get the ability to print the PDF image of the articles. Now there are 200 Elsevier full-text journals available, including 125 journals just added. Within a year, 500 titles will be available for your full-text research.
Why do law librarians care? Elsevier is a world-leading publisher, providing about 25 percent of the world’s scientific, technical and medical journals. Researching these important titles is essential for conducting prior-art searches for patent practitioners, preparing for litigation (reviewing articles written by experts or gaining a better understanding of a technical or scientific principal), and for researching medical malpractice issues. The journals provide invaluable coverage for your patrons who need scholarly articles covering intellectual property, environmental, health and medical issues. And the PDFs are critical for delivering the exact image of the article with the pagination from the journal as well as the images and drawings that are part of these technical articles.
Of course, you can research the Elsevier journals while using the lexis.com search syntax that is familiar to you and your attorneys. These articles also have LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology™ terms added to help add precision to your searching.
If all of this content and capability was available when I was in a law-firm library, I would have used access to these full-text journal articles for our patent department and for some of the products liability cases requiring access to scientific and medical articles.
I think about how much time, effort and aggravation my attorneys, paralegals, my staff and I could have saved if we could have searched the full text of the scientific, technical and medical journals and had the ability to produce a PDF image immediately. Instead we had to work from abstract sources and guess that the articles might be relevant, based on the abstract. Then we had to send long lists of articles that we thought might be relevant to a university library and ask them to pull, copy and deliver the articles. When the articles arrived—sometimes several days later—perhaps the next day (if we were lucky), our attorneys and paralegals had to review the articles to determine if, in fact, they met their needs.
So much of this can be avoided with Elsevier full-text journals available to us to search full text, using the familiar LexisNexis search syntax, without leaving our desks.
As a law librarian, I am always thrilled when I see the feedback I get from law-librarian colleagues result in the addition of essential research tools. I hope these new additions exceed your expectations.
Special Insert Details All 200 Journals
Get searching tips, details on the new practice-area group sources and a brief content summary of all 200 Elsevier full-text journals now available through lexis.com … with this month’s LexisNexis Information Professional Update.
