Using Terms & Connectors

The information in this article applies to the following LexisNexis^® products and services: Lexis+^®, Lexis^®, Practical Guidance

When you use Boolean search logic, such as violat! /5 rico and corn or wheat or soy /10 crop or industry, the service runs a terms & connectors search. With a terms & connectors search, you can control which terms appear in all results and the proximity of those terms to one another. An algorithm analyzes your search terms and retrieves results based on the relevance of your terms.

The following information helps explain what happens when the service runs your search as a terms & connectors search:

• The service counts and searches all terms. None of your search terms are ignored in a terms & connectors search.
• The service treats any text between two connectors as a single phrase. For example, the search national football league and collective bargaining agreement and players retrieves documents with collective bargaining agreement as a phrase but does not return a document based on bargaining agreement or collective agreement.
• If you enter a connector as part of a recognized legal phrase, the service does not treat it as a connector and searches as part of the entire phrase. For example, recognized phrases include search and seizure, act or omission, cease and desist order, or clear and convincing evidence.

 

You can use the following connectors when constructing your terms & connectors search:

• and or & – finds all terms
• or – finds any or all terms
• /n or near/n – finds terms in proximity to each other
• pre/n or onear/n or +n– finds terms in ordered proximity
• /s – finds terms approximately in the same sentence
• /p – finds terms approximately in the same paragraph
• /seg – finds terms approximately in the same document segment
• and not or but not or %– excludes terms from your results
• not /n, not pre/n, not /s, or not /p – finds terms not in proximity to other terms

 

For more information about each connector, see Search Connectors . When using proximity connectors, you may want to use parentheses to group your terms the way you want the search to run. For more information, see Using Parentheses in a Terms & Connectors Search .