SPED 7709: High School Environment - Educating Students with Special Needs (Celona): Lexis-Nexis database

Lexis-Nexis provides full-text documents from over 5,600 news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications with a variety of flexible search options. Search for state and federal regulations, legal cases and more.

When looking for law related information, legal cases and regulations (state, federal and internation), one of the best resources to use is Lexis-Nexis.

Using the Academic Search box in the middle of the screen searches approximately 80% of the database for different types of information. You can use the Advanced Options dropdown box to restrict your search by date range or source.

You have the option, of doing a search by type of information by clicking on one of the boxes beneath it. The first step is to decide what you are looking for as this will determine which search box you want to use. Do you want to find legal cases or articles about a case, law or regulation?

Search the News - Unless you want to search only within a specific news source you will click in the "Search For" box and type in your search terms for your topic. For example type in "elementary schools" and "Americans with Disabilities Act" and click on the down arrow in the "By Source Type" and select Newspapers and then click on Go. The search found 1,000 newspaper articles related to the topic. Once you have a results screen you have several options.

• You can start looking at the articles on the list.
• You can utilize the Results Group box located to the left of your results list. Under the Sources by Category it will show you how of the items fell under each source type (general newspapers, legal news, journals, etc.). Publication Names will display a list shoing how many of the items are from a specific publication. Subject will show you how many fell under a specific subject such as (school districts, human rights, US Americans with Disabilities Act, etc.
• Use the Show option located at the top of the screen to change from viewing a list of items in a brief citation format to show you instead an expanded list with segments from the article, to showing you the Full Document.

Look up a Legal Case - You can search by the Citation or by the parties involved in the case if you know them. Otherwise you can search by topic and see all of the cases that are related and select from there. As an example of a topic, you can try "Middle schools" and inclusion which found 2 cases. When looking at cases the KWIC view under the Show option is a great way to take a fast look at the case overview, outcome and highlights. Lexis-Nexis offers the option to Shepardize the case you are looking at showing its prior history and decisions.

Get Company Info - You can search by company name or ticker #. Most likely you won't be using this search option for this course.

Search by Content Type - Located above the Academic Search box, it provides additional searching options. For instance in the under the Legal section you can click on State Statutes and Regulations to get a search box and then use the Advanced Options dropdown box to restrict your search to a specific state or region..

If you need help using the database, please remember you can contact me or any of the reference librarians for assistance.