The Nexis Uni platform is a great way to start diving into LexisNexis content and it will help you determine if accessing LexisNexis via the API will yield relevant results for your research.  The guide below describes how to limit results to “News” and “Legal News” in order to mimic the API.  If you aren’t able to find useful or relevant results in Nexis Uni, then you aren’t going to find accessing the API useful.

Importantly, any searching and browsing done on this platform does NOT count against our usage limits. Testing your search terms and filters on this platform will help you build a stronger query with more targeted results.

Start by searching for a key term or phrase in the main search box.  You can include date limits if desired:

On the next screen click open the "Filters" menu in the top search bar:

Check ONLY "News" and "Legal News," then click the search/magnifying glass button to limit your results by those filters.

It would also be a good idea to browse the other filter options on the left.  You’ll be able to use these same filters in your API query, so think through if any of them would be useful for refining your initial query, and try them out. 

Browse and review the results being returned on this platform, try going through a few pages of results, and skipping several pages into the results, try to get a sense for yourself if these results will contribute to your research project.  If not, you may need to try different search phrases, or it's possible the content you would like to find is not found in News or Legal News within LexisNexis.

Once you are consistently finding relevant results across various search terms, you are ready to explore the LexisNexis Web Services API User Interface (WSAPI).