Help: Durable Links

Durable URLs for Articles, Shows, and Cases

These URLs retrieve a specific document by choosing the appropriate LexisNexis source and running a well-designed query that should return a single document. It is not necessary or even desirable to have complete bibliographic information in the URL. Your goal should be to use the fewest terms necessary to get a unique hit. This approach will make your URLs shorter and less likely to break. Do, however, use the exact date if you have it. To retrieve an article from a newspaper, magazine, or journal, you will need standard bibliographic information -- publication, author, article title, and date. For the transcript of a radio or television broadcast, you'll need the name of the show and the date. You can also include a few keywords from the title or lead paragraph of the broadcast transcript. Enter an "AND" between non-adjacent keywords.

Durable URLs for Sources

This tool will allow you to create a URL that opens LexisNexis Academic in the Power Search form with the desired source already selected. Use these types of URLs to provide your users with title-level links to newspapers, magazines, and journals.

Troubleshooting

Creating durable URLs requires some patience. A lot can go wrong, and a single missing character can cause your URL to fail. Three different types of functions must succeed for the URLs you build on this site to work: the URL must give the user access to the LexisNexis Academic URL API, the source CSI specified in the URL must be valid, and the search that the API runs must be successful. The most common errors are listed below with some suggestions for resolving them.

URL Not Valid or Not Found

If you get a 404 "Page Not Found" error, then there is something seriously wrong with the first part of the URL (before the question mark). Your URL is not accessing the LexisNexis URL API. The most likely explanation is that you have inadvertently changed the URL. The "Test Link" button simply reads the URL in the box above it. (You can confirm this by typing the URL for any website in the box and clicking "Test Link.") Clicking the "Submit" button again will restore the proper base URL.

No Documents Found

This is usually the simplest problem to fix. If you see this error message in LexisNexis Academic when you open your URL there should be a button for "Edit Search. Choose this option and you will be taken to the Power Search form with the query string you created displayed in the search box. Adjust your query until you get the document you want, then return to the Subscriber Tools and modify the URL to match.

Source Not Available

This error message means that Constant Source Identifier (CSI) used in your URL was not recognized. You will see the CSI in your URL as a number preceded by "csi." For example, URL that searches in The New York times would include the specification: "csi=6742" plus some search parameters. Since CSIs are validated in the Subscriber Tools when you create your URL, this error probably means an error in the title list being used by the Subscriber Tools. Please report these errors to the Product Management Team.

Too Many Documents

If your URL runs a search that brings back more than 3,000 documents, you will see an error message. The error message offers the user the option of converting a relevancy-based search, but this is not a good choice in these circumstances. The relevancy-based search will not work in the same way as the Boolean search that you designed when you created your URL, and it will not have predictable result. If you get this error, or if you simply get multiple documents when you wanted a specific one, use the "Edit Search" option in LexisNexis Academic to refine your search until you get the result you want. Then, return to the Subscriber Tools and make the same adjustments to your URL.