How Does Lexis Advance Rank Results?
When you perform a search on Lexis Advance, the results you get are ordered by Relevance. You can select another results order by going to the Sort By pulldown menu in the upper right, and select jurisdiction, court, date or document title.
How does Lexis Advance order by relevance? Several factors influence the results ranking including:
- Phrase recognition: Priority is given to documents containing legally related terms and phrases identified within the search query. For example, for a query probable cause, a document containing probable cause would be more highly ranked than a document containing probable and cause.
- Case names and citations: The Lexis Advance search algorithm recognizes case names and loose/exact use of case citations, and will more highly rank documents referencing them.
- Concentration of terms: The closer that search terms exists to one-another, the more highly ranked a document will be in your answer set.
- Coverage of terms: Documents which contain all the terms specified rank higher than documents which contain fewer terms but more individual hits.
- Prominence: With respect to case law, the prominence or landmark-status of a potentially responsive document will increase its ranking.
- Recentness of information; level of rendering authority; jurisdiction or forum (local, state, for federal); and validity of the content (has it been negatively impacted by later authority).
- Document Segments: “hits” within certain segments of the document are more important for certain types of searches.
