USING PROQUEST NEWSPAPER DATABASES

To search Proquest newspaper databases on the World Wide Web follow these steps:

1. If you are accessing the databases from on-campus, connect to the Proquest site at http://www.umi.com/pqdauto. Skip to step 4 (no log-in is necessary).
If you are accessing the databases from off-campus, connect to the Proquest site at http://www.umi.com/proquest

2. Click on the Connect button.

3. Enter the Account name and Password supplied to you in class and click on the Connect button.

4. At the "Select Database" page, all of the databases available for our account (S.F. Chronicle, N.Y. Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times) are pre-selected. If you want to limit your search to only the S.F. Chronicle, you can click in the selection box to left of that database.

5. Click the New Search button at the top of the page (or the Continue button near the top or bottom of the page).

6. Click on Subject List (on the right side of the page). The Subject List provides a thesaurus of official subject terms that can be used in the Proquest databases. Enter a search term for your first concept and click on the Find button. Check the list of related terms to find any useful words that you could use when searching for this concept and add them to your search worksheet. (Remember: search words can be all or part of official subject terms and should not necessarily be limited to just words from official subject terms unless you are limiting your search to the subject field.) Repeat this process for each of your concepts. When you have a list of search terms for each concept, you're ready to do an advanced search on your full research question.

7. Click the New Search button at the top of the page and then click on the Advanced search tab to display the "Search by word--advanced" search page. This page includes three search boxes with a search field selection box for each ("Basic Fields" is pre-selected) .

8. Click in the first search box and type in search term(s) for your first concept. If you have more than one search term for the same concept, type OR between the terms.
Example: GENETIC ENGINEERING OR BIOTECHNOLOGY
Use ? for truncation, * for wildcard (single character) [Note: this is the opposite of InfoTrac & Wilson)

9. Click the selection arrow at the right of the first search field selection box and select the Subject field.
(The Subject field will allow the most precise searches for specific topics. If, however, your search does not find any articles, you should try changing the field selection back to Basic Fields and then search again.)

10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 using the additional search and field boxes for each additional concept up to three concepts. (If your research question includes more than three concepts, see step 12a below.) [See example]

11. Click the Search button (at the bottom of the screen.)

12. After submitting a search, a list of the records found for that search will be displayed. The maximum number of records shown is 50--even if more than 50 records were found for the search. Up to 10 records are shown on each Web page. To display the next 10 records, click on the Next box near the bottom of each page.

12a. If your research question includes more than three concepts, you can AND additional concepts to your previous search set(s). To do this:

• Click on New Search at the top left of the page to go to the "Search by word--basic" search page.
• Click in the search box and type in search term(s) for your additional concept.
• Click on "Your recent searches" on the right side of the page.
• Click the number corresponding to the previous search to AND that set to the search term(s) for your additional concept. The search page should then be redisplayed with the set # for the previous search ANDed to the search term(s) for your additional concept.
• Click the Search button (to the right of the search box).
• The list of records for your new search will then be displayed.

13. The Cite/Abstract icon () and/or the Full-text icon () to the left of the citation indicate whether the full-text of the article is available or just an abstract. To display the full record for any article on the list, click on the title of the article (blue underlined words). To return to the list of records, click the Back button on the browser toolbar. If the full record includes the full text of the article and you want to just display the citation and abstract, click the Cite/Abstract icon to the left of the citation.

14. To mark a set of articles from a citations list to print, save or e-mail, click in the check box to the left of the citation number for each article desired. Then click on "Marked List" on the Proquest task bar at the top of the page.

15. To print the displayed record, click the Print Article button at the left of the article display window; then click on the "click here" link. The record will then be reformatted for printing and you can then click the print icon on the Netscape toolbar (or use the print command for any other browser program you may be using) to print out the displayed information.

To save (download) the displayed record, click the Print Article button at the left of the article display window; then click on the "click here" link. The record will then be reformatted and you then select Save As... on Netscape's File pull-down menu (or use the save command for any other browser program you may be using) to save the article to your disk.

To e-mail the displayed record, click the blue Email Article button at the left of the article display window. An email form displays, including the title of the article at the top of the form. Enter an email address and then click Send Email. (You may also optionally specify a subject header and message body comments before clicking Send Email.)

Logical Operators: "AND" "OR" "AND NOT"

Proximity Operators:

W/N (within n number of words) e.g. computer W/3 careers finds records containing "computer" within three words of "careers"

PRE/N (preceded by n number of words) e.g. computer PRE/3 careers finds records containing "computer" three words before "careers"

Truncation/Wild Cards:

? (matches any number of characters)

(Use ? after the word root to find all words beginning with the same root. e.g. vegeta? finds records including the words "vegetable", "vegetables", "vegetation", "vegetarian", etc.)

* matches one character (e.g. WOM*N finds "woman" or "women")

Field Searching:

To limit search terms to a specific field, select a specific field from the search page choices:

• In "Basic Search" mode, use the "Search in" pull-down window field choices --"Citation and abstracts" (default) or "full text of articles"
  
• In "Advanced Search" mode, use the pull-down window field choices, including: "Basic fields" (default), "Abstract", "Publication title", "Subject" or "Text"
  

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These materials may be used for educational purposes if you inform and credit the author and cite the source as: LSCI 105 Computerized Research. All commercial rights are reserved. To contact the author, send comments or suggestions to: Eric Brenner at brenner@smcccd.cc.ca.us