Proquest offers essential research content, such as past and current issues of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and access to thousands of consumer and scholarly periodicals and dissertations.
You will begin your search from this page.
By default, all the databases are selected for you when you access this page. Here you can select or clear all the databases. Clearing all the databases is for those of you who only want to search a limited number of databases. It's much easier to click on one button to deselect and then reselect the databases you want, as opposed to going down the list and deselecting each one individually.
Here is a sample of what is available to you in ProQuest.
–– Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW) –– A comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press.
–– National Newspapers (5) –– Coverage of five major newspapers, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. Note: the Los Angeles Times must be added to this bundle separately per publisher agreement using the associated check box below.
–– Business Module –– Search periodicals on business subjects such as economics, personal finance, marketing, and more in this ProQuest Research Library module.
–– Psychology Module –– Search periodicals on psychology subjects such as human development, learning, psychiatry, and more in this ProQuest Research Library module.
–– Women's Interest Module –– Search periodicals on women's interest subjects such as feminism, history, political science, social science, and general interest as they relate to women's issues in this ProQuest Research Library module.
Not sure which ones to select or deselect? Try them all. Then click continue.
After you have chosen which databases to search, this is where you will actually begin your search.
Here is where you will start by typing your search terms. Put specific terms into the search box to get relevant results. This is also where you will decide whether you want full-text articles, and scholarly journals (including peer reviewed). This all depends on whether your assignment calls for academic resources or general magazines.
If your assignment is to find abstracts, then there is no need to choose full-text. On the other hand, if you need the entire article, you must choose full-text. This will eliminate any non-full-text article from your results.
A scholarly or peer article is one that a scholar or researcher has written. For example, think of the Journal of American Medical Association as opposed to People Magazine. The articles that you find in JAMA would be very different from People Magazine. People Magazine is written for everyone, where JAMA is directed toward people who would understand medical terms and have studied the sciences.
Peer-reviewed simply means that prior to publication, peers of the author have reviewed the article. So if the Journal of American Medical Association were peer reviewed, any article published would first have been reviewed by a panel of experts in the subject the article is about. If the article is about brain cancer, the peers would probably be Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s and nurses and others experts who do research and treat patients for brain cancer. A child psychologist who specializes in child schizophrenia would probably not be on the review panel.
For those of you who want to review what all is available before settling down on a topic, ProQuest allows you to browse by topic! Above the search box is a tools menu. Click on Browse Topics. The menu gives you an alphabetical list of all the major topics covered by ProQuest.
You can go through all the topics or narrow the choices by clicking on the tabs. For example, only look through companies if you know that the information you are looking for is information about a company and not a person. If you want to see everything that is available, then stay with All Topics.
When you see the topic you want, click on "Add to Search."
See the next screen shot to see what happens.
These topics were added into the search box for you! Now all you need to do is click on Search if you want. OR add more search terms. And if you want, you can choose Full-Text and / or Scholarly Journals.
Here's a tip to narrow your search.
If we go back to that "Browse Topics" feature again, you can get lots of help in your search.
By clicking on "Narrow by Related Topic," you will get many more topics that are related to the topic of Madonna and a few that maybe you did not think of.
Another neat trick is to use the thesaurus to look up terms that are also used in addition to your topic.
Using a popular research topic, capital punishment, we find that by clicking on "View Thesaurus Entry," we are able to retrieve synonyms, broader terms, narrower terms and related terms.
This should surely help you narrow or broaden your search if you are stuck.
After doing a search using the "Browse Topic" feature, we decided to search for articles on Madonna the person, shown as PER(Madonna Madonna Louise Ciccone) and added a subject shown as SUB(Musical criticism). Six articles were found using these search terms. This was done without clicking on "Full text articles only" or "Scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed." "Full text articles only" only produced three articles, while choosing both "Full text articles only" and "Scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed" resulted in 1 article. This result will be true of almost any subject that you search for. You will receive less results by choosing full-text articles only and scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed.
Now that we have six musical criticisms of Madonna's music, let's say that only three of the articles pertain to our research. We can mark the articles we want to keep by clicking on the boxes on the right of each title. Next we can always go to that "Marked List" tab to retrieve all articles that we have marked. This feature will also tell you how many articles have been marked, if you need to keep track. Please keep in mind that the maximum number of articles you can mark and save is 50. This feature will also allow you to do the following:
–– Print
your bibliography
–– Email
marked articles.
–– Export
citations into EndNote, ProCite, RefWorks
or Reference Manager.
First we have a screen shot of what the Marked List looks like. In the upper left hand corner, you see the links to print, email and export. We will concentrate on printing and emailing.
When you click on "Print your bibliography", you get this screen shot.
You have a few choices to make in printing your bibliography. First, you must choose the format: citations only or article summaries? Then the citation style.
Format:
–– Citations
only
––
Summaries (citation and abstract)
Citation
style:
–– ProQuest
Standard - citations shown as they appear
in the ProQuest interface.
–– AMA
–– recommended for medicine, health,
and biological sciences.
–– APA
–– recommended for psychology, education,
and other social sciences.
–– Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date - references list with abbreviated
author names followed by dates.
–– Chicago/Turabian: Humanities –– bibliography using
footnotes and endnotes, full author names.
–– MLA
–– recommended for literature, arts,
and humanities.
You have a few choices to make in emailing yourself the articles. Before we start with that, please make sure you fill out everything, and that you type everything out correctly. If you don't type out your email address correctly, your articles will never get to you!
Now, when you email yourself these articles you can send yourself: Article summaries (citation and abstract), Article full text (if available) - no graphics included or Page/Article image - PDF (if available.) If you choose the PDF format, please note that you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to open and read this kind of a document. The reader is provided for free by Adobe at http://www.adobe.com
Next you need to decide whether to send yourself the email as Plain text (compatible with all email programs) OR HTML (not supported by all email programs). This depends on your email program.