LexisNexis

LexisNexis is a popular database, frequently used by those in the legal field. Prior to starting my MLIS degree, I worked as a case manager/paralegal for a large plaintiff’s law firm and we were often using Lexis Nexis to access information relevant to our cases.

For this search, I decided to search only for “cybersecurity” hits that were published in the last year. I also decided to remove “Company Profiles”, as those hits had not been useful to me in previous LexisNexis searches I have done with previous employers. One the results page, I decided to further limit my search to the industry “Information Security & Privacy”.

The article I found was a short news clip that was similar in topic to the article that I found through DIALOG – “Technology: Dissecting The First Version of the NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework”.

What I Learned

I learned today that NIST – the National Institute of Standards and Technology – does not create standards that are required by law. While they are recommendations for best practices and sometimes lead to regulations, companies are not required by law to meet these standards. However, their publications are influential within the industry.

Similar to DIALOG, I recommend limiting your search to a specific industry if possible. It made my results much more targeted and more relevant to the type of information I was seeking. Some topics do not lend themselves well to this process, but cybersecurity definitely fell comfortably under "information security".

Reflection

In my previous work as a paralegal for a major plaintiff’s law firm, I used LexisNexis daily and there is truly nothing like it for searching for case summaries and case law. The indexing on court cases (particularly the ability to search cases by subject) found in LexisNexis is far superior to other products on the market (for example, WestLaw) and I highly recommend LexisNexis as the first stop for any legal searches that need to be done. However, I find LexisNexis to be much slower than other databases we have used and not as intuitive. I would hesitate to put a user with little experience searching databases to work with LexisNexis because the number of results returned is so high and limiting your results takes practice. In general, I would say that I prefer other databases interfaces (such as JSTOR’s or the various ProQuest databases) over that of LexisNexis, especially for materials such as articles that are archived in other databases.