An In-Depth Look at Nexis Data Lab: Putting the Academic Research and Analysis Platform Under the Microscope

What is Nexis Data Lab? The right tool for academic researchers

Big data mining and analysis can result in big headaches for academic researchers. With so much information coming in from a wide range of sources, in various formats, and in different states of usability, it’s understandable if a researcher feels like they’re drinking from a firehose. Who knew ready access to so much data in large quantities could be such a problem? Talk about too much of a good thing!

Only, what if the data isn’t the issue?

The real challenge academic researchers face doesn’t come from the tasks of big data mining and analysis; it comes from the tools they’re using to try and accomplish those tasks. After all, you don’t blame the trees you need to cut down if you only have a butter knife. You don’t blame the apples you need to harvest from their trees if you only have a stepstool. And likewise, you don’t blame the quintillion bytes of data being generated each day when you lack the proper tool to search, curate, analyze, and export it for your academic research.

Like the ladder to the apple orchard, Nexis Data Lab gives academic researchers the means to make the most of their big data mining and analysis efforts.

Nexis Data Lab offers a refined approach to academic research

Nexis Data Lab is an end-to-end text and data mining platform that expedites the data discovery process, so academic researchers, data scientists, and others can quickly identify insights and produce results. Oh, and because Nexis Data Lab is a cloud-based platform, we handle the hosting, maintenance, and engineering behind Nexis Data Lab too, so researchers and academic institutions can focus solely on high-quality data mining and analysis that take them from hunch to hypothesis to validation faster.

The features of Nexis Data Lab

Nexis Data Lab gives universities and other institutions an unmatched ability to search, examine, and analyze data faster than ever—all on a single platform. And it does this through several key features and capabilities:

Enhanced data discovery

So much precious time is wasted on tedious data wrangling needed to make raw data useable. But not with Nexis Data Lab. The platform normalizes data into a semi-structured format for immediate usability. It also uses SmartIndexing Technology™ to classify and tag content using 7,000+ index terms that cover various academic and business subjects, industries, companies, organizations, people, and places.

Rapid data analyses in a matter of minutes

Nexis Data Lab gives students, data scientists, and others the ability to analyze thousands of documents at lightning speed, all within the Jupyter Notebook environment. For example, a university student can combine notebook code, analysis results, explanatory text, and multimedia resources into a single document directly from their laptop. That document can then be exported to the student’s laptop for later use or for easy reproduction of their findings. Students can also save and refine their searchers for further exploration and deeper analysis, and they can import third-party data into their notebooks for research comparison.

Self-service registration

With Nexis Data Lab, students can set up their own user IDs and get started right away. New users will have access to pre-packaged and open source notebook libraries, while more experienced users can easily modify their libraries or create and embed their own code. This also frees up librarians and other university faculty members from having to manage access.

Total personalization over research

Students, professors, data scientists, and others have the option to analyze data via text-based or visual analysis methods. This gives university faculty more bandwidth to vet and publish work, and it provides students greater research autonomy. Users can unlock insights from thousands of documents and millions of data points using their preferred methods, free from the limitations of on-premises hosting and traditional API solutions.

The user experience of Nexis Data Lab

Through enriched data made readily accessible via APIs and customizable data feeds, Nexis Data Lab delivers the unmatched volume of data that researchers require for hypothesis testing, text mining and data modeling, trend analysis, predictive analytics, and more. But the amount of data and how that data is prepared and made available is only half the equation. Nexis Data Lab’s user experience is just as critical, which is why the team behind its development worked to ensure it provided a streamlined research and analytics workflow. You can learn more about the user experience of Nexis Data Lab here, but its high-level functionality includes:

• Intuitive data search and saved dataset retrieval
• Search refinement for easy dataset curations
• Automatic notebook imports
• Prepackaged Python and R notebook libraries

Nexis Data Lab offers a better, more impactful way to conduct academic research

Nexis Data Lab lets researchers quickly search, examine, and analyze data—all in one spot. Learn more about what makes it the tool that can take you from research to eureka in no time flat.