LexisNexis Academic, Congressional, Statistical
By Virginia M. Tanji,
Electronic Collections Committee, UH Manoa Library

Do you or your students need access to full-text news sources, Congressional documents, and statistical documents? Three resources—the LexisNexis© Academic, LexisNexis© Congressional and LexisNexis© Statistical databases—are available to all students, faculty and staff of UH Manoa via Hamilton Library. LexisNexis© Academic is available at UH West O‘ahu.

LexisNexis© Academic has several different databases—news, business, legal research, medical and reference. It includes 5,600 news, business, legal, medical and reference publications with a variety of flexible search options. There is something for everyone, no matter what your field of interest.

LexisNexis© Academic is the answer, if you’re looking for full-text late-breaking or older news stories from international, national and regional newspapers, including New York Times (1980–) and Washington Post (1977–). "Academic" in this case translates to news sources.

It includes the Chronicle of Higher Education; news magazines such as The Economist, Newsweek, US News & World Report and Variety; wires services and broadcast transcripts. Note that certain freelance articles might not be available.

If business is your interest, after opening up LexisNexis© Academic, click on "Business" in the frame on the left side of the screen. You will be offered several options including searching for specific company information.

If you are conducting legal research, click on the "Legal Research" link. You will be presented with a number of choices including the ability to search for full-text law reviews on your subject of interest.

If medicine is your specific interest, click on "Medical." You can search for medical news or medical journals. About 19 full-text titles are offered, including American Journal of Law and Medicine, Health Affairs and Lancet.

The "Reference" portion of LexisNexis© Academic provides brief information on countries and states, biographical searching, contemporary quotes, poll data by subject and an almanac.

Try a search on your favorite topic. Remember to look at all of your choices. The default on most searches is the previous six months so that needs to be changed if you want to go back further.

Check the "Sources" link located to the right of "Home" for information about titles as well as their coverage and to click on the link for searching that specific title.

This is a rich database that offers many different ways of searching it from a "Quick News Search," to a "Guided News Search." Read the "Tips" or "How do I" or "Help" link for some guidance on searching. A little preparation will improve your search results.

Exhibit 1 shows "Quick News Search," which can be used for a quick look-up on a current news topic. However, most of the time you will want to use the "Guided News Search" (Exhibit 2), which requires you to understand a bit more about the database but provides much better results.

Exhibit 1: Quick News Search

Exhibit 2: Guided News Search



An excellent short tutorial on searching LexisNexis© Academic from Louisiana State University can be found at this Web site.

If you need to find a statistic that you’re fairly certain is collected by one of the federal or state agencies, LexisNexis© Statistical is a place that you might begin. However, the statistical data maintained on governmental agencies Web sites is not included here.

Do you need to track a piece of legislation? LexisNexis© Congressional includes full-text resources of detailed information about Congress including legislation, hearings, member voting, rosters of Congressional committees, and the Federal Register from 1980 to present. Included here are also the Congressional Record and documents from 1995 to present, the Current Code of Federal Regulations as well as the Current U.S. Code, and public-laws from 1988 forward.

The CIS Index (Congressional Information Service) is included here and is a good place to start your search if you want to do a search by subject. For example, if you were interested in all of the legislation and bills regarding Native Hawaiians, you might begin with a subject search by checking the subject list. You will find an entry for "Hawaiian Natives." Searching under this topic will retrieve all the documents relevant to Native Hawaiians in the CIS Index.

How do you access these databases? Go to Hamilton Library’s Web site and click on "Lexis-Nexis Academic" if you are searching from the UH Manoa campus or "Remote Access" if you are a UH Manoa user searching from off-campus.

Note that accessing any one of the LexisNexis© databases provides you links to the others.

If you have questions regarding searching any of these databases check with the librarians at the Hamilton Library Reference Desk for assistance.