InfoSkills for Social and Behavioral Sciences

On the ProQuest front page, click on the Advanced Search tab.

This brings you to the Advanced Search page.

❶ Search rules

• Boolean operators
  • When you search for two or more terms together, ProQuest automatically uses the AND operator. For example, searching healthy eating is the same as searching healthy AND eating.
    Note that ProQuest interprets the AND operator correctly, so you can use AND f you prefer to. 
  • Use OR to find any of the terms. 
  • Use NOT to exclude terms, ensuring that none of the results include the terms that follow it.
• Using parentheses lets you control the order in which ProQuest applies the Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), overriding the default precedence. For example, (education OR schooling) AND policy ensures that OR is evaluated first, then AND..
• To search for an exact phrase, enclose it in quotation marks, for example: "healthy eating".
• Truncation & Wildcards
  • The truncation character is the asterisk (*), used to replace one or more characters. The truncation character can be used at the end, or in the middle of a word (e.g., searching for econom* will find economy, economics, economical, etc.).
  • The wildcard character is the question mark symbol (?), used to replace any single character, either inside or at the right end of the word. (e.g. searching for ad??? will find added, adult, adopt).
• When running a search, the search default is set to the field Anywhere, which searches the full record (all indexed fields) including the full text. Other search fields can also be chosen from the pull-down menu, such as Document title - TI, Abstract - AB, All subjects & indexing - SU (subject), Author - AU,  Publication title - PUB (journal title or book title), and more.

❷ Full text, Peer reviewed

• By selecting Full Text, you can restrict your search to items available in full text. However, publications not accessible in full text through ProQuest may still be available via the TiU library, so it’s often better not to apply this limit.
• Checking the Peer reviewed limit will restrict your search to only retrieve articles from peer reviewed journals. 

❸ Publication date

The Publication Date limit defaults to search all dates. Date limits include Last 12 months, Last 3 years, and Specific date range.

❹ Other limits: Source type, Document type, Language

Limiting your search by marking any of the limits will only run your search to include those limits you selected.

• The Source type limit refers to the type of publication. This can include scholarly journals, books, conference papers, magazines, trade journals (professional journals), as well as blogs/podcasts/websites. 
• The Document type limit specifies the format of the full text. This can include articles, blogs, books, company profiles, industry reports, market research, and other formats.
• The Language limit allows you to restrict your search to documents published in specific languages.