HUMAN RIGHTS LAW:

LEXISA quick guide to getting the best out of Lexis

for your research project.

Sarah Crofts, January 2015

Lexis: Help

• Look at

• Using search connectors and Commands, especially: AND, OR,

w/n, w/p, w/s,

• Finding variations of a word, especially the exclamation mark (!)

Your topic: how will you search?

• “is there a right to manifest one’s religion through religious

symbols and attire?”

• Work out the key points in the topic, e.g.

• Religion/religious

• Symbols

• attire

• Using connectors, put together your search.

Try your search using Explore

Advantages of using Explore

• Searches across ALL Lexis content, results are displayed

with tabs for Cases, Journals, Commentary, etc (see grey

tabs)

• Default display of results is in order of source, you can

change this to relevance:

Make sure you are not missing anything

• Think again about your search. Are there any other words

or synonyms for any of your key search terms, e.g.

“attire”?

• Search for synonyms by using OR connector,

• If you are not getting many results, are you using too

many search terms? Have you included both religion and

religious? Try the exclamation mark, e.g. religi! This will

search for any ending: religion, religious, religiosity.

Are there too many irrelevant results?

• Consider using the w/n, w/p, w/s

connectors in place of AND, e.g. religi! w/s

symbols. This will retrieve any references

to “religion/religious” etc. in the same

sentence as “symbols” – they are closer

together so likely to be relevant.

Fine tuning?

• When you feel that you have covered all

variation, use “Search within results”• You might try “article 9” (as appropriate)

Save search

• When you are satisfied with your search you can save it,

create an alert which is useful if you are working on a

continuing project.

• You will be prompted to Save as. You can also set up an

alert at this point:

My Alerts and History

• To view or edit your alerts or saved searches go to the My

Alerts and History tab:

• You can also see the searches you have made over the

last seven days.

Other sources

• This session was all about Lexis, but don’t forget that

there are other materials relevant to Human Rights Law in

other databases, such as Westlaw.

Thank you and success in your research

• Senior Academic Services Librarian: Sarah Crofts

• Email: cs02@gre.ac.uk, x9078

• Law Subject Guide http://libguides.gre.ac.uk/law

• Information & Library Service • Blog: http://uoglibrary.blogspot.com

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