Speed and Accessibility: COVID-19 Quick Searches Make it Easier to Parse the Pandemic’s Innovations

But if credible, reliable data is what you’re after, you’re in luck. Nexis® Customer Success Managers have created a series of COVID-19 pre-populated search strings to help clients quickly find meaningful insights surrounding coronavirus developments. These Quick Searches—accessible from the Nexis home screen—are entirely customizable and cover a variety of topics, including:

• Major world news
• Supply chain disruptions
• R&D and innovation
• Cyber security
• Donations and giving
• Immigration and border security
• Job losses

“We’re experiencing these unprecedented times alongside our clients. We’re just as invested as they are in staying on top of scientific, legal and financial news,” explained Maureen Spadoto, Digital Customer Success Manager for Global Nexis Solutions and one of several engineers of the COVID-19 Quick Searches. “Our team asked ourselves, ‘What would we want from Nexis?’ The answer was very clear: fool-proof access to accurate, reliable, credible information. We built these search strings with speed and accessibility in mind.”

Plucking a Needle from a Haystack

Why rely on Nexis when so much COVID-19 content is available online, often for free? Spadoto says the answer is simple: there’s just too much to manage.

“There’s so much information to parse, it’s overwhelming,” she said. “You might be able to find what you’re looking for using a free search engine, trying variations of increasingly narrow search terms, scrolling through pages and pages of headlines, and so on.And once you find what you need, you would have to copy and paste to aggregate it all into one document. Who has that kind of time?”

Instead, she suggests finding exactly what you’re looking for with a couple of clicks.The pre-built COVID-19 search strings use a common set of keyword parameters that can be edited for your own needs using the “Narrow By” pane within the results. Once your search results are targeted to your research needs, you can annotate and aggregate content into shareable folder, as well as set up alerts to deliver ongoing search results directly to your inbox as frequently as you need. (Check out this webinar for more tips on how to find and share within COVID-19 Quick Search results.)

Spadoto offered an example. Let’s say you’re looking for the latest information on COVID-19 vaccines and tests. A great place to start is to browse scientific publications and intellectual property records. The R&D and innovation search string provides access to respected scientific sources and IP records,as well as financial and legal content that can be narrowed down by specific publications, key search terms and more. Sources include ClinicalTrials.gov, earnings call transcripts, , scientific journals and even legal motions and proceedings.

Scholars and Scientists: An Important Distinction

Spadoto also noted another key difference between research available on the open web and that which is delivered by Nexis.

“If you’re interested in highly researched, bleeding edge innovations, you’ll likely have to reference periodicals and journals written for and by the scientific community. That kind of content typically lives behind a paywall, unless you have Nexis access,” she said.

For more pandemic news and data, be sure to check out the COVID-19 Quick Searches Nexis has prepared, which you’ll find on your Nexis® home page.Simply click to run and identify meaningful insights surrounding COVID-19.

You can also stay up-to-date on a host of topics by accessing our free global COVID-19 resources, which includes:

• Real-time news media analysis through our Nexis Newsdesk media tracker
• A look at how COVID-19 impacts political, economic, social, legal and environmental risks
• The latest news and analysis on how the coronavirus is affecting laws, regulations and enforcement patterns across the globe.