Introduction

Depending on your research, you may need information from news sources: articles in newspapers or magazines; stories from wire services; or transcripts of news broadcasts on radio or TV. This guide will help you use the LexisNexis database, which is an excellent source for news information. We assume you have already done the Library's Searchpath tutorial (http://www.shepherd.edu/libweb/searchpath/searchpath/). If not, you should do that first. It will give you crucial skills and save you a lot of time in the end.

Types of documents

News is published in a variety of ways, and you can find them all on LexisNexis:

newspaper and magazine articles

good for facts about events and analysis of news; larger papers and magazines also do investigative reports about government or social issues

wire service stories

the articles written by wire services and distributed to newspapers all over the country; usually facts and quotations without detailed analysis

broadcast transcripts

the verbatim record of what was said in news reports on TV and radio, as well as discussion and interview shows that give insight into the views of politicians and other prominent interviewees

Newspaper and magazine articles

LexisNexis Academic is a database of millions of documents, including articles from most major US newspapers and news magazines, plus transcripts of news broadcasts. It is particularly helpful that the full text of all articles is available right in the database. Here's how to use it:

1. From the Scarborough Library homepage (http://www.shepherd.edu/libweb/), click on "Popular Electronic Resources" and choose LexisNexis Academic from the popup menu.
2. If you're off campus, you'll have to sign in.
3. In the red bar at the top, click News.
4. Note that you have two choices: Natural Language (the default) and Terms and Connectors. Natural language searching is similar to Google; Terms and Connectors searching gives you more control. I recommend Terms and Connectors, so click that option.
5. In the search boxes, you can type phrases or individual words.
6. Choose the connectors "and" or "or" from the dropdown boxes. For information on how the connectors work, see the Searchpath tutorial (http://www.shepherd.edu/libweb/searchpath/searchpath/module2/11-keyword2.html).
7. Note that you can use fields to specify what kind of search term you are entering. For example, if you're searching for articles by a certain author, enter his or her name and choose the "byline" field from the box underneath. If you do a keyword search and find that your search retrieves too much information, you can search in the "headline and lead paragraphs" field so that you only find articles where your search terms are mentioned in the title and the opening section of the article -- these should be among the most relevant ones.
8. Note that you can also limit the articles by the date.
9. Finally, you choose what news "sources" (i.e., databases) you want to search in. Look at the dropdown menu to get an idea of your options.
10. Go ahead and run a search, so you can see what the results look like.
11. After your search runs, you'll get a list of articles that match your search. They are in order by date - it's probably more useful to switch that to sort them by relevance: Click on the dropdown menu near the top of the page and choose "relevance." Then the articles that have the most to do with your topic should be near the top of the list.
12. Also notice the left-hand section of the results screen. This shows the different kinds of "sources" (i.e., databases) that the documents are coming from. You can click on a category and only see documents from that type of source: for example, click "newspapers" to see only the articles from newspapers.

Wire service stories

A wire service is a company that provides news stories to newspapers and radio and TV stations. The wire services, such as Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, have reporters all over the world who send stories electronically through the wire service to all the news organizations that subscribe to the wire service. These organizations then publish the stories as part of their own newspaper or news broadcast. You can find the stories that were disseminated by wire services on LexisNexis. They are useful for quick, basic facts about a person or an event. To find wire service stories, you search as above, but when you select a source, choose "Wire Service Stories." Everything else is the same as described above.

Transcripts of broadcasts

LexisNexis contains verbatim transcripts of news broadcasts and interview programs from all of the major commercial networks, as well as public radio and public television. Follow the directions above under newspapers and magazines, but when you select a source, choose "Transcripts." In the next box, you can choose "All Transcripts" or a particular show or network. The rest of the process is the same as described above.