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You are watching basic searching in ProQuest Central.
In order to search in ProQuest Central, you must first
go to the library homepage, which can be found at cumberland. [dot]
edu/ [slash] library. Once there,
click on the "articles and databases" link, which is the second link
underneath the "research" section.
ProQuest Central is the second database on the list.
Click on the link to bring up ProQuest's homepage.
If you are searching off-campus, you will first need to log in to the library's
off-campus proxy server before you will be able to access ProQuest.
The proxy server verifies that you're associated with the university
and the log-in is your Cumberland username and password.
After you have logged in to the proxy server, you'll be taken
to the ProQuest homepage and can search in the same way you can
on campus. There are
many different search options in ProQuest, but for now, we're just
going to focus on basic searching. We're going to look for articles
related to the Prohibition Era in the United States. When choosing
a search term, it's important to start with one that is broad enough to give
a lot of results but not too broad that it is giving a lot of unrelated,
irrelevant results. In a basic search, ProQuest will
look at the text of the entire text of the article for the search term, so if only
use the term "prohibition", we will get a great deal of unrelated results.
Since we know that the results we want are related
to the prohibition of alcohol, let's go ahead and enter the search term
"alcohol prohibition" to start. As we
type in the search term, ProQuest will begin to use an auto-complete
feature to determine what we are searching for. This is
similar to the feature that Google uses. It is helpful because it shows
suggestions of different, related searches that can help you narrow down your
research topic. After typing in the search term, I'm
going to limit my search results to full-text
and peer-reviewed results. Full-text results
will give the entire text of the article versus just a citation
or an abstract. Peer-reviewed results include research
that has been evaluated in order to maintain quality.
Most professors require at least one peer- reviewed article for assignments,
so this is a good way to find those articles.
Next, click on the magnifying glass in order to begin searching.
The search term "alcohol prohibition" gave us over
2,000 results. This is definitely too many to
search through, so we can do a couple of things to narrow our results and make the
research more manageable. First, you can click on one of the
suggested subjects offered by ProQuest. This will help
your search become more focused. If we click on the second
result, "alcohol use
and prohibition era", we see that the number
of results drops dramatically, to around 75 results.
Notice, if you click on a suggested subject, the
full-text and peer-reviewed boxes are unchecked.
Recheck those and click on the magnifying
glass again to add those limiters back into the search.
By doing so, we take our results down to just 9 articles.
In addition to ProQuest's suggested subjects,
there is another way to limit your search results. On the right
side of the page, there is a sidebar with options to narrow
the search results. These options are sometimes called limiters.
There are several different limiters, so let's go through
a few of them so you'll understand how they can help your search results.
The source type limiter shows the different kinds
of publications that the documents in your results list were found in.
All of the limiter menus show up to the top five
results, ordered from the type that has the most documents
to the least. Beneath the source type limiter is a list
of various relevant document information limiters, such as
publication title, subject, and
language. The document feature
limiter will allow you to choose results that contain certain data,
such as a reference list, tables, and photographs.
Finally, the date limiter
will allow you to choose documents from a selected date range.
This is a good limiter to use if you are required to use documents that
have been published within a specific date range.
Using limiters may seem like a roundabout way to narrow down search results,
but it is a good way to ensure that we get more precise results.
It will be helpful for assignments which require articles that meet
very specific criteria or have to include certain things.
Searching is not always precise and straightforward and will sometimes
require you to reevalute what you are looking for.
Allow yourself adequate time to do research in order to avoid the frustrations
that can happen when searching in databases.
Also, if you become stuck and cannot figure out how to find better search results,
then contact us for additional help.
Our "ask a librarian" page is located under the "how do I"
section on the homepage. It will show you how to contact us
by IM, email, and telephone.
Good luck with your research, and thanks for watching!