ENSP 102: Introduction to Environmental Policy

Search Strategies:

Check out the UMD Libraries' Guide to Nexis Uni.

Use the following search strategies to retrieve relevant articles when using Nexis Uni.

• Limit results to news articles: Select the "News" tab at the top of the screen or under “All Content Types” on the search bar.

• Truncation: The asterisk (*) searches for a string of characters, no matter how the word ends.

• Phrase searching: Use quotation marks or hyphens to search for an exact phrase, instead of a single word.

• Operators:

  • "And": For some topics using "and" between words is the best search strategy. You may end up with a large number of results and some may not be relevant.

  • "/s": limits keywords to the same sentence.

  • "/p": limits keywords to the same paragraph.

  • "hlead": limits keywords to the headline and lead paragraphs

Too many results? Try:

• limiting by date
• adding more words
• searching within results

Examples:

Using the topic, "Can the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution be used to address the harms associated with climate change?", enter the following examples into the database and see how your results change with each search.

1. "climate change"
   • This searches climate change as a phrase, instead of climate and change as separate words.
2. "climate change" and "due process clause" and constitution
   • This search links the keyword units.
3. "climate change" /s "due process clause"
   • This search finds climate change within the same sentence as due process clause.
4. ("climate change" and harms) /p "due process clause"
   • This search finds climate change and harms within the same paragraph as due process clause.
5. hlead ("climate change" and harms)
   • This search finds climate change and harms within the headline or lead paragraphs of articles.

Note: If you want to search the Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun and the Wall Street Journal, you will need to use the National Newspapers Core database.

Search Strategies:

Use the following search strategies to retrieve relevant articles when using National Newspapers Core. This is also a full-text database.

• Select the Advanced Search option, once you are in the database. It will allow you to control your search a bit better.

• Truncation: The asterisk (*) searches for a string of characters, no matter how the word ends.

• Phrase searching: Use quotation marks or hyphens to search for an exact phrase or an exact word.

• Operators:

  • NEAR or N/# operator: Finds documents where the search terms are separated by up to a certain number of words of each other (either before or after). NEAR finds records with the words separated by up to 4 words. N/# will find records where the words appear with a maximum of # intervening words.

  • "And": For some topics using "and" between words is the best search strategy. You may end up with a large number of results and some may not be relevant.

Too many results? Try:

• Limiting by date
• Adding more words
• Changing the search field from "Anywhere" to "Anywhere except full text" or "Abstract"

Examples:

Using the topic, "Can the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution be used to address the harms associated with climate change?", enter the following examples into the database and see how your results change with each search.

1. "climate change"
   • This searches climate change as a phrase, instead of climate and change as separate words.
2. "climate change" and "due process clause" and constitution
   • This search links the keyword units.
3. "climate change" N/10 constitution*
   • This search find results with constitution (and it's variants like constitutional) within 10 words of climate change.