ProQuest Tutorial Script
Slide 1
Welcome to the ProQuest online orientation.
ProQuest is an online index to magazine, journal and newspaper articles and
it provides access to 21 online databases in the areas of business, social science,
health, education, science, humanities, psychology, religion and current events.
Full text articles, which are articles reproduced in their entirety, are included
for many publications. During this orientation, you will learn how to search
ProQuest using the basic, topic, publication and advanced searches.
Slide 2
You can connect to ProQuest through the library home page at http://lrc.sierracollege.edu. You can select one of the quick links under “Find Articles” or you can select research databases to see a complete list. If you are connecting from an off-campus computer, you will be prompted to log in with your MySierra username and password.
Slide 3
Sierra College subscribes to many different databases through ProQuest. You can choose to search individual databases or search all ProQuest databases. For this demonstration we will search ProQuest Research Library, a multidisciplinary database and a good place to start your research.
Slide 4
This is the ProQuest Basic Search screen. Type your topic in the basic search box. Let’s search for articles on the effects of global warming on glaciers. The best way to search ProQuest is to take your keywords or phrases and combine them with the word AND. Enter global warming AND glaciers in the search box. This is called a keyword search and it will find articles that contain the phrase global warming and the word glaciers in the same article. Click the search button to start your search.
Slide 5
You now have a list of articles displayed in descending order by date, displaying the most recent articles first. You can choose one of ProQuest’s suggested topics to refine your search or choose one of the articles below. This number indicates how many articles were found, in this case, 291. The gray tabs allow you to limit your results by the type of publication such as scholarly journals or magazines. You may also limit by showing only articles with full text available or by displaying the most relevant articles first. We’ll explore more options for limiting and refining your search later in this orientation.
Slide 6
Each entry is an article citation beginning with the article title. The article title is a link and you can click on it to get to the full record for the article. The 6th article, “Danger Signs” has links for both full text and full text pdf . This means that you can display and read the entire article online. Both display options will give you the full-text of the article, but the pdf display will give you an image of the article as it originally appeared in the print publication, including all accompanying graphs, tables and pictures.
Slide 7
This is the record for the article “Danger Signs.” The display starts out with the citation for the article including the article title, author, publication title, date and page number. This article appeared in E: The Environmental Magazine and was published in the March/April 2008 issue. Farther down you will find an abstract, which is a brief summary of what the article is about. Below that you will find the text of the article. Back to the top of the screen, you have the option to print or e-mail the article.
Slide 8
You can also start a folder and add articles to the folder as you go. Mark the article by clicking the box next to “mark document.” Marking the article will save it to the “My Research” folder. You can click on “back to results” to get back to the list of articles.
Slide 9
Now we’re back to the results list. Let’s select “Into Antarctica’s Action Zone”.
Slide 10
This article from New Scientist does not include full text. You will see the citation information, a listing of subject headings assigned to this article and an abstract. Check with a librarian to see if the full text of this article is available in print, in another online database or through inter-library loan.
Slide 11
Back to our results list notice that you may select to set up an alert so ProQuest will e-mail you when new articles are available on your topic or you can get this information through RSS feed. You can also refine your search by clicking “refine search.”
Slide 12
You have several options to limit
your search results. You can choose another database or select multiple databases.
The full text box limits the search to only articles with full text available.
The scholarly journals box limits your results to articles published in scholarly
or peer-reviewed journals. The date range limits articles to a specific publication
date or range of dates. The publication title box allows you to limit the search
to articles published in a specific magazine or journal. You can also limit
by the author’s name or search for a specific document type such as film
review.
Slide 13
Let’s select the full-text box and the last 12 months for our date range. Click the search button to re-do our search.
Slide 14
Our search has been narrowed to articles published during the last year with full-text available. You can continue to add articles to the “My Research” folder by clicking the box next to the article title. Click the tab that says “My Research” to display your folder contents.
Slide 15
From here you can e-mail your articles or create a bibliography. Always compare your bibliography with the appropriate style guide, such as the MLA Handbook or the APA Handbook to make sure the format is correct.
Slide 16
Keyword searching is fine for most
cases, but to get more precise search results, you can do a topic search. Click
on the topics tab at the top of the screen and type your topic in the topic
guide box. Let’s try a search for mercury.
Slide 17
Now we have the topic list for mercury. Here you can select the topic astronomy or stars and galaxies if you want to research the planet Mercury or you can choose mercury and fish to explore the presence of mercury in fish. You can also click on “narrow by related topic” to further refine your search.
Slide 18
This is a list of more topics within our selected topic of mercury and fish. To find articles on food contamination and poisoning caused by mercury in fish, click view documents under the first heading.
Slide 19
You now have a list of relevant articles. Please note that each time you select a new search type, such as topic or advanced, you lose your search limits. Limits can be reapplied on the new search screen or by using the grey tabs and links at the top of your search results. You may want to know which publications are indexed in ProQuest. Click the publications tab at the top of the screen.
Slide 20
In the “publication search”
box you can type in the title of a magazine, newspaper or journal. For example,
try a search for Newsweek.
Slide 21
This entry tells us that full text for Newsweek is available from 1998 to the present. Click on the title to display more information.
Slide 22
From this screen you can search for a specific article or topic within Newsweek. You can also view all the articles in a specific issue by clicking on the date.
Slide 23
You’ve seen the basic, topic and publication searches. Now for even more flexibility and search options, you can try the Advanced Search. Here you can search in specific fields of the record such as author, title or subject. You can combine words using the Boolean operators AND, OR and AND NOT. The AND operator will search for all of your words and narrow your search results, the OR operator will search for either word and increase your search results and the AND NOT operator will exclude a word from your search results. There are also additional limit options at the bottom of the screen.
Slide 24
Let’s try a search for articles by a specific author on a certain topic. Type Pepperberg, Irene in the first search box and select author for the search field. Type parrots in the next box and select citation and abstract for the search field and behavior in the last field. Finally, limit the search to scholarly journals.
Slide 25
You result list has seven articles about parrots and behavior by Irene Pepperberg.
Slide 26
This concludes the ProQuest online orientation. If you have any questions please feel free to ask a Sierra College librarian.