This guide is created to show you how to search on the Lexis Advance® Hong Kong platform.
Lexis Advance® Hong Kong is a full text database that provides access to cases, legislation and journal articles on all aspects of law. Source documents include Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, US and other countries.
SELECT Lexis Advance® Hong Kong:
From the Databases page on the Library homepage, select Lexis Advance® Hong Kong.
1. Lexis Advance® Hong Kong Research: click to go back to homepage.
2. Browse: click to view publication or legal topics.
3. Red Search Box: three search options available: i) Natural Language, ii) Terms & Connectors, and iii) Let Advance Decide. i) Natural Language: daily English you would use talking to another person. You may enter your search terms as a question using the words, phrases, and citations. Lexis Advance analyses the query to uncover significant terms and to interpret actual meaning based on complex algorithms. ii) Terms & Connectors: contain multiple words, phrases, or citations connected to each other by special operational terms such as AND, OR, /n, and so on. You may use this when you want certain connectors are enforced in your query or when you want search terms not joined by connectors to be treated as a quoted phrase. Any terms in your query not linked with a connector are treated as a quoted phrase. This is a "stricter" search than Natural Language. Example: marriage contract and breach will be searched as "marriage contract" AND breach. iii) Let Advance Decide: You could let Lexis Advance® decide which one is more appropriate for your search based on your search words.
4. Advanced Search: helps you to conduct a more refined search by Cases, Legislation, Secondary Materials and Forms & Precedents.
5. Quick Find: You can also search cases, legislation, secondary materials (i.e. journals) and defined terms (i.e. definition from dictionary or legislation).
6. Publications: Get fast access to a list of Hong Kong publications by clicking a title.
SEARCHING FOR LEGAL MATERIALS:
1. As you type, the Red Search Box offers suggested legal phrases, documents or publications. It offers to run your search in natural language or terms & connectors. You could also let Lexis Advance® decide which one is more appropriate for your search based on your search words.
When you select the Table of Contents (TOC) link of a publication title, you will be able to browse the TOC all the way through to document level. When you select the publication title, you will add it to your search in the Red Search Box. Your search results would be within the scope of your selected publications.
You can click Search: Everything link to narrow down your content type and/or legal topics.
2. After you finished entering your query, hit enter to proceed.
3. Scroll and view the top results by relevance. In the Snapshot View, the first four material types in your search are open to display automatically. Search terms are highlighted in different colours; they are displayed in a slide bar in each record to show you the frequency of words and where they appear in the document.
If you want to further narrow down your results, you may type in more search terms in the Search Within Results box. You may also switch to Natural Language search to see a different a list of results for the same query.
4. Click title link to open.
You can change your result display. Click graphical view to display a slide bar. Click full view to show more sections, and condensed view for citation information only.
VIEWING YOUR SEARCH RESULTS:
1. On CaseBase view, you will find information such as summary, court history, citation, and/or other cross-reference details to the case. To view the full report, click on the case citation link i.e. [1994] 1 HKC 191.
2. On the full-text view, you can choose to download the reported judgment in Hong Kong Cases (HKC) report format, PDF or Word format. Table of Contents is available for browsing other cases or you may use “previous” and “next” arrow to move along cases.
If you wish to return to your last position in the results list, click Results list.
Browsing Legal Materials
i) On Lexis Advance® Hong Kong, you can choose to search or browse legal materials.
1. On the homepage, click Browse drop-down menu.
2. You decide the jurisdiction and whether you want to search by content type or city, practice area or publisher. OR you can type in the title in the Publications box, and then hit search.
3. On the result list, click Get documents to view the journal. Click on the article title to open full text.
4. Or if you want to search for a specific article within the journal, click Add publication as a search filter, then enter an article name or keywords in the search box.
New Features
International Cases allows you to conduct searches through multiple Commonwealth jurisdictions at once. You can choose International Snapshot View to display the top three results for each jurisdiction for more comprehensive coverage or Full View to display a full list of results from the UK by default for more focused coverage.
TERMS & CONNECTORS FOR SEARCHING THE DATABASE:
| Connector | Retrieves |
| AND | Links words or phrases that must appear together in the same document, no matter how close or far apart: bank AND deregulate |
| OR | Links synonyms, antonyms, alternate forms of expression, etc. Broadens search results: outlook OR forecast OR trend |
| W/N | Locates search terms within a certain number (N) of words of each other. Does not specify word order: market W/5 share (read: market within five words of share) |
| W/S | Looks for documents with search words in the same sentence; cannot be combined with the W/N: Copyright W/S fair dealing |
| W/P | Looks for documents with search words in the same paragraph;cannot be combined with the W/N: airline W/P merger |
| AND NOT |
Looks for documents in which a search word or phrase is to be excluded: |
Click Lexis Advance® Hong Kong Ebook Guide or How to Set Up Lexis Advance® Hong Kong Alerts (for individual account users) for more details.
For further information, please click Lexis Advance® Hong Kong Videos or read Lexis Advance® Hong Kong Starter Guide.
