Academic Searching: Find All Articles

LexisNexis Academic does not provide the "browse issue" feature found in some databases. However, you can easily construct a search to retrieve all articles from a specific date or date range. Many people choose a common word when trying to check whether there are any articles in a given date range. This is not very effective. The trick is to use a search terms that you know must occur in every single article. The two best candidates for this type of search are the date and the publication name. To find all articles in a specific issue of a newspaper or periodical, use the technique illustrated below. LexisNexis Academic requires you to enter a search term, so this method makes the date itself the search term.

• Use the Source tab to pick the newspaper or periodical you wish to search (Number 2)
• Leave the date selector box set at "All available dates" (Number 3)
• Be sure you are using Terms and Connectors searching, and then enter the DATE IS operator and the issue date (Number 1)

You can use the same approach to search a date range, but it the search string becomes more complex:

(DATE > 12/31/2007) AND (DATE < 1/31/2008)

Another approach, which does not involve any algebra, is to use the date selector box and enter the publication name as your search terms as illustrated below. Since you already restricted the search to a specific source, it is not logically necessary to use the publication name. However, LexisNexis Academic requires you to have at least one search term. This technique uses the publication name because it is guaranteed to occur in every article.