Date Issue in LexisNexis
I think some of my readers who know I do unofficial bug testing and can break anything will find this amusing. Also, you news librarian folks might want to pay attention.
I discovered a minor date problem while searching in LexisNexis. When doing some issue monitoring, I search for dates behind and ahead of the current date. At halfway through the month, I advance the end date to encompass the next month. (Some monthly magazines and other publications load their content into LexisNexis before the publication date and I want to find those articles, too.) I usually write the dates mm/dd/yy. The search I tried running had the range 12/15/04 through 1/31/05. In Factiva, this worked fine. LexisNexis gave me no results.
I knew there were articles for my search from between 12/15/04 and the current date because of previous searches. I couldn’t figure out why those articles weren’t showing up in the results, so I figured it was a problem with the dates. After doing some tinkering, I discovered that LexisNexis doesn’t seem to like 05. If I type the dates as 12/15/2004 and 1/31/2005, I get articles. A number of variations of this range with 05 return nothing.
I don’t remember LexisNexis having issues with dates at the end of other years, but maybe I just haven’t noticed. I swear I’ve done searches ranging over December and January successfully before. I wonder if it’s just an end-of-year glitch or if 05 won’t work in January, either.
