1. ProQuest Platform Advanced Search: Taking it to the Next Level
2019

2. Session Objectives At the end of this session you will be able to:
Perform Advanced Searches on the ProQuest Platform
Increase search precision by becoming familiar with ProQuest Platform search tips
Utilize the thesaurus to locate subject terms

3. Advanced Search
Your institution's ProQuest subscription can include many databases, covering a wide range of subject areas. When multiple databases are selected, the number of databases you are currently searching is displayed at the top of the ProQuest window, like this: Databases (219)
Click the Databases link to view the current list and select or deselect databases.

4. Advanced Search – A Closer Look
Create a search that is as precise as you need it to be.
In the first row, enter one or more words in the box. Following the box is a dropdown of search fields. Search fields are discrete bits of indexed information—such as Author, Document title, or Subject heading—about individual documents. Select from the list, or accept the default Anywhere.
Click Search or continue to the second row to add to your search.
The second row begins with the operator dropdown list. The selection you make from the list will establish a relationship between the word you entered in the first row, and any word that you enter in the box or boxes in the second row or after. For example, you might enter environment in the box in the first row, select Subject heading (all) from the search field dropdown, keep the default AND operator at the beginning of the second row, enter oil in the first box in the second row, select Document text from the search field dropdown at the end of the second row, click Add a row, select the OR operator from the beginning of the third row, enter petroleum in the third box, select Document text from the search field dropdown at the end of the third row.
If needed, use the Remove a row link to remove rows you’ve added beyond the default two.
ProQuest will search for your word(s) in the selected search fields.
With Anywhere selected, ProQuest looks for your words (search terms) in all fields—including any available abstract or full text—of all documents in all selected databases. You may see that the default has been set to Anywhere except full text (this is adjusted by your PQ administrator in the PAM).
Select the Full text checkbox to find only documents that provide the complete full text, versus just a citation or abstract.
Select the Peer reviewed checkbox to find only documents reviewed by subject matter experts.
Use the Publication date dropdown to restrict your search to documents published within a particular timeframe.
Look up links
For some fields included in the Search fields drop-list, you can browse—using Look up links—a list of all available terms, and select one or more to add to your search.
Autocomplete -- search term suggestions as you enter your search
If enabled by your administrator, autocomplete provides suggestions from previously successful searches by ProQuest users. The list changes as you type, to match previous searches that start with what you have entered at any point. Click any term in the list to immediately search for that term.
You can click the Turn off auto-complete link to disable search term suggestions for your current ProQuest session.
Use operators to specify relationships between your search terms
The second row of the Advanced Search form begins with a dropdown menu of search operators. Insert operators between search terms to specify relationships that tell ProQuest how to interpret and run your search.
Operators in the list are:
AND — Find documents that contain all of your search terms in the specified (or any) search field. AND is the default selection, meaning that if you don’t change it, ProQuest will look for documents that contain all of your search terms.
OR — Find documents that contain any of your search terms in the specified (or any) search field.
NOT — Find documents that contain the first, but not the second search term in the specified (or any) search field.
Use the Search tips link from the top of the Advanced Search page for a complete list of operators that you can use in other ProQuest search methods, including Basic, Advanced, and Command-Line. We’ll cover search tips in more detail later in this presentation.

5. Advanced Search – Another Close Look
The second-half of the Advanced Search page displays the Source type, Document type, and Language search fields (these are available for many databases). If you don’t make any selections here, then you default to search ALL options available under each search field. If you do want to search for a specific type, then just select accordingly and you will ONLY search the marked selections. The list of source types, document types, and languages that are available for you to search on will vary depending on the databases you are searching.
Additional fields may also display here depending on the databases you are searching. See the next slide for an example of the Advanced Search page from a single database.
At the bottom of the Advanced Search page is the Results page options (this menu is closed by default). From here you can adjust the sort order of the results page, how many items per page will display, an option to exclude duplicate documents, and Show additional terms included in the search.
Duplicate documents arise when the same document is available from multiple selected databases. By default, ProQuest includes duplicate documents in your search results. To prevent duplicates from being included in your search results, select the Exclude duplicate documents checkbox. When you exclude duplicates, only the document deemed most relevant (based on its indexed metadata) to your search will display in your results.
Display search expansions (show additional terms)— By default, ProQuest evaluates the terms you enter to also look for US/UK spelling variants (color, colour), comparatives (smaller, bigger), superlatives (smallest, biggest) and plurals. This behavior is called ‘search expansion’ and helps you discover relevant results you otherwise would miss. When you select this option, only the search terms with expansions are highlighted in the Results-page search box; additional terms included in your search are displayed in a panel beneath the search box. The default state of the checkbox on both pages is deselected.

6. Advanced Search – A Single Database
When searching a single database on the ProQuest Platform, the Advanced Search page will likely display unique indexing/searchable fields for that resource. This example shows ABI/INFORM, and compared to the search across all databases view from the previous slides, you’ll notice that this search page shows separate search fields for Company/organization, NAICS code, Classification code, Location, Person and Product name. When you are searching more than one database together on the ProQuest Platform, the Advanced Search page displays the indexed fields that are common across all the resources you have chosen to search. One way to think about this is also that the more databases you are searching together, the less fields in common you may have across those databases. Even with that in mind, standard indexed fields apply across most databases (such as title, author, publication date, abstract).

7. Search Tips
ProQuest will retrieve documents containing all your search terms, appearing in any field (document titles, authors, subjects, full text, etc.) therefore assuming an AND relationship between your search terms
Broaden your search - separate your search terms with OR
Narrow your search - separate your search terms with AND
Phrase searching - look for phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks, for example, "healthy eating“
Word variants - to retrieve only a particular variant of a word, such as colour but not color, enter the word in quotation marks in the search box, for example: "colour"
ProQuest will retrieve documents containing all your search terms, appearing in any field (document titles, authors, subjects, full text, etc.). For example, a search on healthy eating is the same as a search for healthy AND eating. The search will not retrieve results with just the word healthy or just the word eating. ProQuest will look for the terms healthy and eating in all fields.
Note: If your account does not search full text by default, a notice to that effect displays above the Basic Search box. This means the account does not default to Anywhere as the search default but instead to Anywhere except full text (NOFT).
You can enter operators in either lowercase or uppercase - OR will work the same as or.
Additional Search Tips information available from our ProQuest Platform LibGuide Search Tips page: and our ProQuest Platform LibGuide Searchable Fields page:
Additionally, view the ProQuest Platform search tips help file here:

8. Search Tips Continued
Your search terms can include any letters or numbers
ProQuest ignores punctuation characters — such as periods, commas, and colons — in your search terms
ProQuest does not recognize any list of stop words
ProQuest ignores diacritical marks
ProQuest search supports the UTF-8 character set (managed by the Unicode Consortium). You can enter your terms in English, or any other language, such as French, Spanish, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. Whether your search retrieves any documents will depend on matching content or indexing being available in ProQuest. For example, the Russian word быть (meaning 'to be' in English), retrieves just a few documents from some ProQuest databases. However, if быть displays in its transliterated English form of byt' in some databases, your search for быть will not find those results. Search for быть OR byt' to find all relevant results.
To search for chemical formulas or other strings that contain sub or super-scripted characters, enter all the characters in the correct order. For example, a search for CH3CH2OH will correctly retrieve occurrences of the chemical formula for ethanol, as CH3CH2OH
Stop words: ProQuest does not recognize any list of 'stop words.' For example, if you search for 'cat in the hat,' ProQuest will search for ‘cat AND in AND the AND hat.’ The default relevance sorting of your results will bring documents that contain all of your search terms — mostly as 'cat in the hat' — to the top of your results list.
Diacritical marks: Indexing and content terms carrying diacritical marks, like umlauts (Ä) or accents, can inconsistently carry the mark, or not. Because of that inconsistency, ProQuest ignores these marks. For example, a search for the word før (Danish for 'before') will not only retrieve for, but will also retrieve all records containing för, fór, and fòr. A search for any of these terms will retrieve the same results.
Some special characters are always going to be interpreted in the context of specific kinds of searching:
Greater than (>) and less than (<) symbols are reserved for date searching.
Brackets and parentheses are used to build 'nested' queries. For example: cow AND (dog OR cat) If you use them with any other intent, your search is unlikely to retrieve what you expected.
The slash (/) is reserved for use with proximity operators, as in PRE/4

9. Operator Precedence
ProQuest follows a default order when interpreting a search that uses operators to combine search terms.
If your search includes operators such as AND or OR, ProQuest combines them in the order indicated below:
PRE
NEAR
AND OR
NOT
For example, the search:
education AND elementary NOT secondary
is interpreted in this order:
(education AND elementary) NOT secondary
Note: For more controlled searching, use parentheses to override ProQuest's default operator precedence.
View the ProQuest Platform search tips help file here:

10. Search Fields
Every document in every ProQuest database is indexed to capture individual bits of information about the document.
You can use indexed search fields to create very precise searches.
AU(smith) will retrieve only documents where smith appears in the author field.
Similarly, AU(smith) and TI(food) will retrieve only documents with food in the title and smith as the author.
AB,TI(food) - retrieve documents that have food in the title, or documents that have food in the abstract.
AB,TI(food or nursing) - retrieve documents that contain either food or nursing in the abstract, or in the title.
For more information, see the online help file for frequently used search fields:
Or go to the ProQuest Platform LibGuide searchable fields tab:
Please remember that indexed search fields vary by database and many databases have unique fields that may not be found elsewhere. If you are interested in the search fields for a specific database, check to see if we have a LibGuide for that source and view the searchable fields page for that LibGuide (from this page check the table to the left called ProQuest Platform LibGuides and make your selection):
Remember that many of the frequently used fields will be available from the Advanced search page pull-down menu next to each search row. You can however, enter and type in the field code manually into the Advanced Search page search rows or directly into the Command-Line Search.

11. Wildcards & Truncation
Character
Description
Example ?
Wildcard character (?) - used to replace any single character, either inside or at the right end of a word. Multiple wildcards can be used to represent multiple characters.
Important to know: A single ? wildcard character will match both zero and one character.
Cat? will return matches on both cat and cats. Similarly, cat?? will return matches on cat, cats, and catch—0, 1, or 2 characters in that example.
nurse? Finds: nurse, nurses, and nursed. sm?th Finds: smith and smyth ad??? Finds: ad, ads, adds, added, adult, adopt *
Truncation character (*) - retrieves variations of the search term. Use the truncation character at the end (right-hand truncation) or in the middle of search terms. Each truncated word can return up to 500 word variations.
Standard truncation (*) retrieves variations on the search term, replacing up to 5 characters.
farm* Finds: farm, farms, farmer, farming colo*r Finds: colour, color
[*n]
Defined truncation ([*n] is used to denote up to how many characters you want to truncate. It replaces up to the number of characters specified, for example [*9]. The maximum number of characters that can be entered is 20.
nutr[*5] Finds: nutrition, nutrient, nutrients
Important to know: You cannot enter a wildcard (?) or truncation (*) character at the left-hand/leading position of a search term. For example, *old or ?tion would both be invalid searches. You also cannot search with a single wildcard (?) or single truncation (*) character. Both are invalid searches.
Any terms retrieved using either truncation (*) or wildcard (?) characters are not considered when sorting your results based on relevance. That's because there is no way for ProQuest to assess the relevance of these terms to your research. For example, your search for 'bio*' could return occurrences of any or all of these terms: 'bionic' or 'biosynthesis' or 'biodegrade' or 'biographic.' One, some, all, or none could be relevant to your research.

12. Numerical Operators < > <= >= - Character Description
Example
<
Less than - Used for numeric fields like publication year.
YR(<2005)
>
Greater than - Used for numeric fields like publication year.
YR(>2005)
<=
Less than or equal to - Used for numeric fields like publication year.
YR(<=2005)
>=
Greater than or equal to - Used for numeric fields like publication year.
YR(>=2005) -
Use a hyphen to indicate a range when searching numerical fields, such as Publication date.
YR( )

13. Command Line Search
More ways to do an Advanced Search - Use Command Line Search
Click Advanced Search in the main navigation to access both Advanced Search and Command Line Search. If you’re more comfortable building search statements at a command prompt, using search fields and operators, then Command Line searching might be for you.
Command Line Search is designed to help you build a precise search using operators to combine different fields that target your search terms. ProQuest will only search the fields you specify. Alternatively, you can simply search on a word or phrase. Command line searching is useful if you want to quickly combine fields within a search without filling in each of the fields individually, or when you need to find information in one field, but NOT in another.
To perform a command line search, you can prefix your term(s) with field name abbreviations and enter them directly into the search box. For example: AU(Miller) and PUB(physiol*).
Alternatively:
Click Add search fields.
Click the arrow next to the Search fields dropdown and choose a field code.
If you want to combine fields with Boolean operators, click the arrow next to the Operators list and choose the required operator.
Click Add to form.
Enter your search term(s) in the brackets for each field.
Running multiple searches at once
Command Line Search supports the concept of iterative searching. Iterative searching is simply the concept of running a search, refining that search, running a second search, and so on—possibly combining searches as you go. The goal is to narrow, or broaden your initial search to get the results you want.
To run multiple searches at once:
Enter a search in the box. If you’re entering a very long search, just keep typing; the search will wrap to a new line as necessary.
Press Enter or Shift+Enter to start a new line.
Enter a second search.
Repeat steps 1–3 until all of your searches are listed.
Click Search.
All of your searches will run, and:
A results list for the last search you entered will display.
A new list item corresponding to each of your searches is added sequentially to the Recent Searches page.
Search fields
Look up links
For some fields included in the Search fields drop-list, you can browse—using Look up links—a list of all available terms, and select one or more to add to your search.
Field codes
Field codes (sometimes called mnemonics), provide a shorthand alternative for search field names.
ProQuest will interpret both the field name and its corresponding code the same.
For example: author(Smith) is the same as: AU(Smith)
Important to know: Some field codes only return results for some databases.

14. Command Line – Keep in Mind
Command line searches—including any operators or search field codes you include—are case-insensitive 
You can use wildcard characters and truncation characters in your search (what we learned in slides 8 – 13)
You can use command line syntax in any search box in ProQuest that does not target a specific search field. For example:
The Basic Search box
The search box at the top of a Search Results page
The Advanced Search page, with the default Anywhere selected
Remember that this presentation shows the Advanced Search and Command-Line Search from the perspective of searching more than one database. Although ProQuest functionality is generally consistent across the application, differences in content do exist and sometimes force slight interface differences. This is especially true when you are searching a single database.
Your administrator can specify whether ProQuest should look for instances of your search terms anywhere including the full text (Anywhere), or anywhere except the full text (NOFT). The default setting includes full text; if your administrator has changed this setting, the search page will display a message indicating this. Regardless of which option has been set, you can still use the full text checkbox on the search screen to retrieve documents with full text; the administrator setting just controls where ProQuest will look for your search terms.

15. Thesaurus
The thesaurus shows relationships between terms such as synonymous or related terms, and hierarchical arrangements such as broader terms, or narrower terms. Many subjects also have associated scope notes.
Open the Thesaurus from the Advanced Search or Command Line Search page. From the Thesaurus page you will see the list of thesauri available for your currently selected databases.
Most databases have an associated thesaurus (also called a controlled vocabulary of subject terms). Using these thesauri, editors assign one or more subject headings to each document in each database. With a thesaurus opened, you can browse subject terms, or select one or more to add to your search.

16. Thesaurus Views
After selecting your Thesaurus, you can search for subject terms Containing or Beginning with the word you have entered. The first screenshot displays the hierarchy for the term “mental disorders”.
After searching for your term, click the term to display the hierarchy.
Beneath the subject heading, you will see suggested Narrower terms.
Click the scope notes icon next to any term for a brief definition of the subject term and then Related terms (screenshot 2).
You can select terms by using the mark feature and then use the Combine using option to OR, AND, NOT your terms together.
Click Add to search and then the search is placed into the Advanced Search or Command Line search (the search goes into the page you were on when you initially selected the Thesaurus link).
For any term you find in the thesaurus, you might see one or more of the following (or similar) bolded words and phrases:
Use terms/Use term for — synonymous concepts pointing you to authorized terms.
Use instead — these terms are the preferred thesaurus terms for your search.
Narrower terms — more restrictive terms associated with a subset of records.
Broader terms — less restrictive terms associated with a larger set of records.
Related terms — similar terms suggested for use with your search.
Scope notes — Scope notes contain information about the use of a subject heading. The scope note may contain a definition of the subject, the year the subject term came into use, and other important information.

17. Session Objectives
After reviewing this presentation, you should now be able to:
Perform Advanced Searches on the ProQuest Platform
Increase search precision by becoming familiar with ProQuest Platform search tips
Utilize the thesaurus to locate subject terms

18. Additional Resources
ProQuest Platform LibGuide:
Visit the Education Tab within the LibGuide for additional resources and presentations including:
Basic Search: Getting Started
Save, Share, & Organize Your ProQuest Research
Elearning Modules
Contact for webinars

19. Include contact information

20. Demo