Q: Can clinical professors, adjunct professors, lecturers, or other non-tenure track faculty access Lexis Nexis REST API?
A: No. Only tenured and tenure-track faculty, PhD students, and post-docs doing academic research - with approved projects - are eligible.
Q: Can undergraduates or masters students access this data?
A: No. Only tenured and tenure-track faculty, PhD students, and post-docs doing academic research - with approved projects - are eligible.
Q: Can people outside of NYU (consortium members, co-authors) use this data?
A: No. All researchers must have a subscription to the relevant dataset(s) through their home institution. No exceptions.
Q: Can I use the REST API to text mine the Wall Street Journal?
A: No, WSJ is owned by a separate company, Dow Jones. You will need to use ProQuest TDM Studio to text mine WSJ.
Q: Can I use the REST API to text mine the New York Times?
A: Yes, NYT was restored to inclusion in the API's underlying dataset.
Q: Some of the titles I want to text mine are not available in Nexis Uni/LexisNexis. What should I do?
A: Confirm whether we have access to other titles via our other text data sources. You may need to combine data outputs or substitute titles--contact our Data Services team for guidance. (Individuals who have funding may need to reach out to the publisher of titles not in these products to request pricing for custom data pulls.)
Q: How much can I download?
A: LexisNexis staff will assist you in scoping your project to meet your stated needs and their download restrictions.
Q: My query is returning results extremely slowly. How do I fix this?
A: Extremely slow output is usually a sign that you are being automatically throttled. Reach out to your LexisNexis technical contact for help understanding what about your specific query is triggering throttling, and advice on how to adjust your query to prevent slowdown.
Q: Can you pull the data I need?
A: No. While LexisNexis and NYU Libraries can provide guidance, end-users are responsible for querying the API.
Q: Where can I find studies/papers that have used the LexisNexis REST API?
A: Search Google Scholar for "LexisNexis WSK", "LexisNexis text mining", etc.
Q: I am using the sample queries from this site and they aren't working. What's going wrong?
A: NYU's client credentials, which are required to query the API, are not included in these examples.
Q: I just need some text data to run through my machine learning algorithm/artificial intelligence software. What can I access immediately?
A: The New York Times annotated corpus in our Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) database is one popular choice. Discover other sources that can be immediately downloaded on our Text Data Mining guide.
Q: Can I mine images from news publications using the LexisNexis REST API?
A: The LexisNexis REST API is limited to text only. There are no images in the underlying data.
Q: What is 429: Too Many Request error?
A: NYU access is restricted to 5 requests per minute, 200 per hour, and 2,500 per day. A 429 error signifies that the daily limit has been reached. Please wait 24 hours before attempting to extract data again. For preliminary research, please use Nexis Uni and solutions.nexis.com.
