Enhanced FIND A SOURCE Tab Hits Home for This LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant
By Rachel Baarz
Sometimes the greatest challenge as a legal researcher is not the request itself but finding the best source to help kick-start your research.
Here’s a scenario that may sound familiar: While working the reference desk, an attorney calls with a research request on employment termination. You know your library’s print collection is limited on this topic, and you don’t want to borrow another treatise from the firm across the street. Surely the answer can be found online easily, so you log onto lexis.com and begin your research.
But where do you begin exactly? Does clicking Labor & Employment under Area of Law – By Topic seem too broad? As you contemplate the best ways to pinpoint the best source, you notice the FIND A SOURCE tab. But you hesitate. Do you dare type in “employment termination”? Similar searches haven’t yielded the best results in the past, since FIND A SOURCE only searched publication title.
But now that’s changed. LexisNexis listened closely to the comments and suggestions received from information professionals and recently released a new FIND A SOURCE tab! This much-enhanced tab offers more on-target lexis.com sources in the results. (You can also get more details on using the new FIND A SOURCE tab from the August 2008 issue of LexisNexis Information Professional Update.)
When finding sources via FIND A SOURCE, you have two options:
Option 1: Type in keyword, list, or phrase
Enter employment termination and click FIND.
The results range from Wrongful Employment Termination Practice to BNA® Labor Relations Reporter Individual Employment Rights Manual. That’s because FIND A SOURCE now looks in multiple segments within the LexisNexis Online Source Guide (not just in the source title), so you can enter search terms and find relevant sources that don’t have your specific search terms in the title.
Also notice each source found is now only listed once. And each search retrieves up to 300 sources, and the results are ranked by relevance. Terms and connectors can also be used in FIND A SOURCE and may be helpful in narrowing down your results list. Instead of employment termination, you could enter employ! /10 termin!
Another way to search in Option 1 is by using a source’s library and file name. For example, enter NEWS;NYT to find The New York Times® or GENFED;NEWER to find all federal cases after 1944.
Option 2: Browse Alphabetically
If you know the title of a source you wish to find, or you would like to browse all sources that begin with the same letter or word, use Option 2. Select a letter of the alphabet and then use the drop-down box that appears to go to the page that starts closest to your title. Using these alphabet breaks you can now jump quickly to a portion of the alphabetical listing that contains the title of the source you need.
