NILS Publishing Company developed the first version of their Insurance Law Thesaurus in the early 1980's, as the company began the task of bringing order to the chaos of compliance research. A review of the language used by the states to regulate American insurance organizations quickly led the company's editors to a few hard truths: most states regulate the same activities, but they use different terminology in their regulation. As publishers, the challenge was to provide our customers with an enhanced service that could overcome the variation in the language of laws and regulations, and provide quick access to comparable documents.

Central to achieving this objective was a controlled list of index terms that would guide both our indexers and our customers. This list was enhanced with cross-references to reflect the relationships that exist among concepts: for example, "group health insurers" are members of the broader group called "health insurers," which are part of the very broad group called "insurers." The thesaurus that resulted from this effort has since been used to produce the back-of-the-book indexes found in the Redbook volumes of the National Insurance Law Service, as well as controlling the index terms used to index each document in the INsource CD-ROM and Web services.

NILS indexers read every INsource document for meaning, look for existing similar documents, and make INsource indexing as consistent, specific and comprehensive as possible. When an indexer encounters a new concept in insurance regulation, they first attempt to describe that concept with a combination of existing index terms. After discussion with senior indexers and a review of the INsource database and industry information, NILS may add a new index term. Whenever a new index term is added, existing INsource records are reviewed for its possible application. In these ways, the INsource Thesaurus and indexing remain dynamic, reflecting the changes occurring in the law. Just as important, INsource indexing provides quick and confident access to the laws and regulations across states.

The Thesaurus is designed to help you find the INsource index term(s) that will prove most helpful to your research project. In many cases, you can perform perfectly satisfactory INsource Insurance research without reference to this online Thesaurus. That's because NILS has used popular industry terminology as its preferred index terms, whenever possible.

• Start with significant words and phrases from your research question.
• Tie those words and phrases together with the AND operator.
• Run your first search against All INsource Fields and against all jurisdictions available in your subscription, to ensure the broadest possible retrieval.
• Scan the Search Results List for a document that appears to be on target. Review the document to confirm it responds to your research question. If it does not, return to the Search Results List and find another.
• Once you've found an on-target document, review its subject categories, index terms and other INsource-exclusive indexing, for element to use in your next search.
• Change States for your search to the set of jurisdictions you are most interested in. Save your selection of states.
• Enter the elements from your document review in the Search screen's FIND box(es), specifying the field(s) in which you expect to find those elements.
• Execute your new and improved search.

• You find no documents in one or more states, when you believe that the missing states must, in fact, regulate the subject of your research.
• You still find too many documents, or too few documents in most states.

In each of these cases, you should refer to the INsource Thesaurus. Look up one or more of the index terms you're using in your search (especially those that relate to line of business, type of insurance, or kind of policy).

Consider replacing the term in your original search with one or more of the Broader or Narrower index terms you find listed under a term you've already used. This technique works because some states (the states that are missing from your results set, perhaps) can regulate topics more broadly or more narrowly than others. For example, many states maintain broad statutory and regulatory requirements that apply to all insurance policies (or all health or all casualty or all life insurance policies) issued in their jurisdiction. A search for requirements pertaining to a specific type of policy may be too narrow in such instances.