How to Improve Academic Research in Higher Education

A digital platform for the next generation of academic and professional researchers

Our Nexis solutions excel at making relevant and enriched data quickly and easily accessible to anyone who needs it. And when we say “anyone,” we don’t just mean business decision-makers and lawyers; we provide reputable sources of information to students, educators, and university faculty members for all kinds of academic and scholarly research purposes.

In fact, our Nexis Uni^® platform offers simple, intuitive research functionality that’s been informed and designed based on the input given to us by current university students (i.e., digital natives who have never known a world without the internet or Google). This means Nexis Uni is fine-tuned to deliver the digital research experience that students and young educators want—accessible from their own laptops, smart phones, and tablets.

Curated academic content, ready for citation

Students will always need to conduct academic research for papers, presentations, and team projects. But now educators, libraries, and institutions of higher learning can ensure that students have an efficient, digital means to conduct fast, highly informed research. That’s because Nexis Uni not only streamlines the research experience, but it also grants students and researchers access to over 17,000 news, legal, and business sources, all of which we curate for academic and scholarly research.

Make team collaboration easier—and research more efficient

For team projects, Nexis Uni features a wide array of built-in collaboration and discovery tools. Students can quickly find and share facts and insights between one another, so they can focus more on crafting their thesis instead of pouring over research documents and trying to get everyone on the same page. Within Nexis Uni, students are able to create and share folders in a collaborative workspace, and they can add notes and highlights to documents for their team members to review and comment on in return.

Another great benefit of Nexis Uni is that it reflects the exact kind of research tool that students will likely use once they find themselves in the professional world. In other words, providing students access to Nexis Uni is one more way a university can set them up for success in their post-graduation careers.

It doesn’t matter if a student is a rookie researcher or a seasoned academic familiar with database research. Nexis Uni enables students of all experience levels to conduct either natural language or complex Boolean searches across our entire content collection to find citation-worthy content across:

• Print and online journals, television and radio broadcasts, newswires, and blogs
• Local, regional, national and international newspapers with deep archives
• Extensive legal sources for federal and state cases and statues, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 1970
• Unparalleled business information on more than 80 million U.S. and international companies and more than 75 million executives

Nexis Uni offers a clear advantage for academic institutions

But how does Nexis Uni specifically benefit individual educators such as professors and librarians? Because Nexis Uni is intuitive and features a streamlined, user-friendly interface, librarians have to provide little to no training, which frees them up to focus on more important tasks. Meanwhile, professors in the classroom can use Nexis Uni to gain greater visibility into student participation.

Intuitive discovery coupled with personalized search experiences

While Nexis Uni does support campus-wide IP-authenticated access, our research platform also lets students create individual profiles. These user-based profiles work in conjunction with our search functionality to offer several benefits, including:

Benefit #1: Customized home pages

Students have the option to set their home page to any one of our available discipline pages. These pages provide fast access to content that’s curated based on areas of study, so that searches become even more relevant to a student’s focus. We’re adding new discipline pages all the time, and you can learn more about the ones currently available here [link to asset that discusses discipline pages in greater detail].

Benefit #2: Bookmarking and other user-based functionality

By creating a user profile within Nexis Uni, students gain the ability to book documents for later viewing, save searches to re-run later, create alerts on topics of interest, and easily retrieve previously viewed documents. (Also, setting up user IDs and creating passwords is a self-service process, so librarians and IT teams won’t get bogged down with registration requests.)

Benefit #3: Task-based search tabs and results filtering

First-year students can use convenient task-based tabs to jump straight into conducting research for common assignments such as writing a paper or making a presentation. And students of all experience levels can quickly drill down to highly relevant results based on location, publication type, subject, industry, geography, and timeline.

Are you ready to reimagine academic research for your students? Learn more about how to get started with Nexis Uni here.