Normally, when you enter search terms into LexisNexis, the system automatically will search for the singular and regular plural (any word where the plural is formed by adding “s,” “es,” or “ies,”) form of your term. LexisNexis is also NOT case sensitive. Therefore, you may type your search terms in all lower case letters.
However, you may have a situation, where you need to “force” a singular or plural form, or require that one, all, or none of the letters show up as capital letters. For these special situations, LexisNexis has integrated into its search engine Precision Commands. Simply type the “command” followed by your search term(s) in parentheses.
There are two commands that deal with singular and plural forms of words…:
- singular (term) requires that the search term show up only in its singular form in a document – e.g. term
- plural (terms) requires that the terms always show up in its plural form in a document – e.g. terms
And two commands that deal with capitalization of words…:
- caps (term) requires that all of the letters in the term are capital – e.g. TERM
- nocaps (term) requires that all of the letters are in lowercase – e.g. term
- caps (term) requires that at least ONE letter is capitalized – e.g. Term
Finally, there is one command that deals with the frequency of terms within documents. Usually, LexisNexis will search for the term you entered and will retrieve any document where that term is mentioned at least once in the document. By using the ATLEASTn command, you can force LexisNexis to retrieve documents that mention your search term at least a certain amount of times.
- atleast3 (term) requires that any documents retrieved will contain “term” 3 times or more
These commands may also be combined by “nesting” the sets of parentheses. For example – if you are looking for documents discussing the disease AIDS – try typing in your search terms this way:
- allcaps (plural(AIDS))
You may also want to find documents that mention AIDS at least 3 times…
- alteast3 (allcaps (plural (AIDS)))
So, don’t forget your precision options…
- singular
-
allcaps
-
atleastn
- plural
-
nocaps
- caps