How to use Factiva

Perhaps you want to limit your search to just The New York Times?

You recall seeing an article on how colleges and universities are handling the coronavirus crisis, or want to know what the New York Times has published on the subject.

• Type hl=(college* or universit*) w/5 (COVID-19 or coronavirus), and change the Source code to The New York Times - all sources 

  • The hl= command tells the search engine to search in the headline field only.

  • The parentheses are for nested searching – allowing you to search for EITHER college OR university and EITHER COVID-19 OR coronavirus. Increasing the number of keyword synonyms enables you to broaden the search and capture the greatest number of relevant articles.

  • The w/5 command searches these two concepts within 5 words of each other 

  • By putting a * after college and universit, it tells the search engine to search for both the singular and plural forms of these words. For example, college or colleges and university or universities.

  • The result list highlights the search term "hits" in yellow

• You can do this with other sources too, for example, searching just the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, or the category Major News Sources, just change the Source code to highlight the source you want to search.

Short video outlining how to limit your search to just the New York Times in Factiva. 

Maybe you are looking for a specific article that ran in The New York Times, e.g.: "The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead"

• You can use the hl= feature in the free text search box combined with the source code for the New York Times and the date field:
•  hl=The Coronavirus in America; source code=New York Times - all sources; date = last three months.
  • If you are looking for an older article, you'll need to change the date range to capture the publishing date of the article you are seeking.