ProQuest

Search Tips

Enter your search term(s).  ProQuest looks for your search terms in:

  • document titles
  • authors
  • abstract
  • subjects
  • full text
  • tags (user-generated tags)

Phrase searching:

If you enter a phrase, e.g. climate change, ProQuest will look for documents that contain both climate and change in any of the document information listed above.

To search specifically for the phrase, not as individual words, surround your words with quotation marks (just like Google). For example, “climate change” or “life after death”.

Find out which databases you’re searching

Information about which databases you are currently searching is displayed in the blue bar at the top of the ProQuest window. Click on the down arrow to see the listing. You can then check off your selections and uncheck databases you don't want to include. 

The Advanced Search in ProQuest provides many choices for narrowing down your results, such as by date range or document type.  If your results are still too numerous, the following search operators help in formulating your query much more precisely:

Search Type

Format

Example
Boolean Searching AND
OR
( ) to group synomyns or similar terms		 entrepreneur* and team*
entrepren* or intrapren*
(entrepren* or intrapren*) and interviews
Truncation * (asterisk) entrepreneur* (searches for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, etc.)
Proximity - Same order pre/X market pre/2 share
Proximity - Any order w/X market w/2 share (would search for "share of the market")
Wildcard ? (question mark) wom?n

 

Truncation and Wildcard Characters  

  • The symbol * is used as a right-handed truncation character only; it will find all forms of a word.  For example, searching for econom* will find "economy", "economics", economical", etc.
  • The symbol ? is used to replace any single character, either inside the word or the right end of the word.
  • For example, searching for "wom?n" will find "woman" and "women." Searching for "t?re" will find "tire", "tyre", "tore", etc.
  • ? cannot be used to begin a word.  

 

More About Boolean Searching  

Boolean, proximity and adjacency operators are used to broaden and narrow your search.

Operator Description Example

AND

 Look for documents that contain all of your words or phrases.
Use AND to narrow your search and get fewer results.		 food AND nutrition
OR Look for documents that contain any of your words or phrases.
Use OR to broaden your search and get more results.		 food OR nutrition
NOT Look for documents that contain one of your search terms, but not the other.  nursing NOT shortage
NEAR/n or N/n

Look for documents that contain two search terms, in any order, within a specified number of words apart.  Replace ‘n’ with a number. In the example, 3 means within 3 words. 

Used alone, NEAR defaults to NEAR/4.
Important to know: When you shortenNEAR to N, you must provide a number. For example, internet N/3 media. If you search on internet N media, ProQuest interprets Nas a search term, rather than as a proximity operator.

 nursing NEAR/3 education
media N/3 women
PRE/n or P/n or -

Look for documents that contain one search term that appears within a specified number of words before a second term.

Replace ‘n’ with a number.  In the example, 4 means the first term precedes the second term by 4 or fewer words. 

A hyphen (-) joining two terms within a search is equivalent to PRE/0 or P/0.

 nursing PRE/4 education
shares P/4 technologies
nursing-education

 

Mark the items you wish to print and click the PRINT/EMAIL/EXPORT/SAVE options at the top of the result list.

The BROWSE link leads to additional, specialty content, such as company profiles, industry reports, country profiles, business videos, dissertations, and more,  In the Entrepreneurship database, the BROWSE feature provides a listing of topics.