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Lexis Advance at Penn Law

March 12, 2012

ubiq2.jpg

A Lexis Ubiq II Terminal, introduced in 1983
Image courtesy of the Computer History Museum

By Ellen Qualey, Reference Librarian

 

Students, faculty and staff at Penn Law now have access to Lexis Advance, a new legal research database from LexisNexis.Similar to WestlawNext, Lexis Advance strives to streamline the research process by integrating its content in a universal search box. Users can search all of Lexis Advance’s content at once and narrow their results through a variety of facets, such as jurisdiction, content type, or date.

 New features of Lexis Advance not found in classic LexisNexis include:

  • The ability to save and organize documents into personalized folders
  • A visual representation of a case’s procedural history in Lexis Advance’s Shepard’s report
  • Legal Issue Trail, which allows researchers to search for other cases on an exact point of law articulated within a case opinion
  • A visual representation of your search history, plus your search history is now stored for 90 days (Lexis Classic stores search history for 30 days)

Like WestlawNext, users most comfortable with natural language, Google-like searching may prefer Lexis Advance over classic Lexis. While Lexis Advance does recognize Terms and Connectors, other advance search functions such as segment search or searching by a specific legal issue with Lexis’s Topic and Headnotes classification system are not currently available in Lexis Advance. As a result, researchers needing narrowly tailored searches may have more success in Lexis Classic. Regardless of what system you prefer, if you need assistance with your research please feel free to contact a reference librarian.