What is in ProQuest?
ProQuest databases are particularly good for business, economics, finance, humanities, social science, science, and general research. Major databases Included : Historical New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABI/INFORM, and Hoover’s Company Records, Proquest Research Library and Proquest Central.

ProQuest Education Journals The leading full-text journals
ProQuest Health Management Health, Business: journals, magazines, dissertations
ProQuest Newspapers  Search the full collection of newspapers including Te Wall Street Journal and The New York Times
ProQuest Psychology Journals Psychology: journals and magazines
ProQuest Research Library Search the full collection of journals, magazines, and newspapers. The database is made up of a number of specially searchable modules
ProQuest Social Science Journals Search full-text periodicals covering the social sciences

                                                             
The Historical New York Times is listed under ProQuest but must be searched separately from the other databases.

Historical Databases NOTE: Historical databases cannot be searched in combination with non-historical databases.
     ProQuest Historical Newspapers:
     The New York Times (1851-2003)
                Offers full page and article images with searchable full-text back to the first issue

How to use ProQuest:
Searching the databases:
• A single database can be search by clicking on its title.
• You may search all the databases at once by selecting “Select All Databases” at the top or bottom of your screen.
• You may cross-search particular databases of your own choosing by checking the boxes in front of those titles only.

Specialized Databases
Searching the Historical New York Times (HNYT):
The HNYT cannot be searched as a group search with other ProQuest databases.
 The HNYT uses different search methods than the other
  ProQuest databases.
 
Special Tips for Searching Hoover’s database of company records:
 When using Hoover, search by a company’s name.
                  Hoover’s strength is that it can find a company’s
 competitors and link directly to them.

ProQuest Search Parameters

AND Narrows the search; must include all words entered into the search
OR Broadens the search the search; the search will include either of the search terms entered
AND NOT Eliminates a word from the search the document will contain the first word but not the second
Within/3 The first word of the search must occur within three words of the other
Pre The first word search will occur prior to the second word search
Field Limiters Field Limiters let you focus your search by searching just one area of the database such as author, title or abstract.
Stop Words Common words such as “the” or “he” will always be excluded from the search
Wildcard Use the ? symbol to replace a single character
Truncation Use the * symbol to search for all endings of a word
Quotation marks “ “ Searches for the words in the exact order that they occur in the search

 ProQuest Search Tips:

2 word queries are searched as an exact phrase by default: (special education)

3 word queries are searched as words that need to appear in proximity to each other by default: (New York Orchestra)

Narrowing Results
Search can be narrowed by adding more words, using field limiters, using data limiters, limiting the results to full text and publication type.

Sorting Results
Results are sorted by date but can be sorted by relevance.

Publication Search
The publications included in the database are searchable by title. The publications tab allows you to search for an individual periodical title.

Suggested Topics
The topics displayed are related to the search terms. When you select one of these search terms a new search is performed.

Additional Features

Search Alerts
Search alerts will email you when new materials using your search terms are added to the databases.  Alerts may also be added for publications.

RSS Feed
RSS feeds provide you with updates for your search. The feed can be added to your favorites or to a feed reader such as Bloglines.

The results from your search can be printed emails or the link to the results can copied.

8/5/2008