HOW TO USE THE DATABASES PROQUEST ABI / INFORM Read How to devise a search strategy before using this guide. Proquest ABI / Inform includes full text for articles from over 2000 journals and magazines on business and management. Also provides full text dissertations and 5000 business case studies. KEYWORD SEARCH Access Proquest from Athens www.openathens.net and log in using the logins you have been allocated. Click on the Advanced tab at the top left, to go to the advanced search screen. It is easier to formulate a complex search using this screen. Use the Search tips feature at the right top of the search slot, to discover the search tricks supported by this database, to make your search as effective and efficient as possible. 1
From the advanced search screen, enter your concepts in the search slots /lines, being careful to use one line for each separate concept. Use search tricks like truncation symbols, quotation marks around phrases, and Boolean operators, for a more efficient search. To retrieve the most relevant results, open the pull-down menu beside each search slot and highlight Document title. That way, your search terms have to appear in the title of any article that is retrieved. If you don t make this change, articles will be retrieved that contain your search terms in their full text, and this often means they are not focused on your topic. You can further narrow your search by using the filtering mechanisms below the search slots (see the screen shot above). Click on the box beside Scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed if you want to exclude magazine and newspaper articles, and retrieve only scholarly articles. Click on the box beside Full text documents only if you do not want to see citations for articles without full text in this database. If you are doing an extensive search for a major assignment, it is inadvisable to exclude articles without full text. Although you may not find the article in Proquest, the citation may help you find it in another database. If you can t find it in any of the Academy s databases, ask a librarian to find it for you. If you want only recent articles, or an article from a particular time period, open the drop-down menu beside Date range. Select After this date, and type 01/01/2005 (for example) to retrieve only articles published after 2004. Click on Search to conduct your search. 2
If you get a screen like the one below, first check your spelling / typing. If all is correct, then your search is too narrow for this database. Go back to the Advanced search screen by clicking the back arrow and adjust your search. If you do get results, the display will look like the screen below. Under the heading Results, you will first see a section called Suggested topics. The database has read your search terms and is suggesting other terms you might use to refine your search. Make a note of these for later. Below the Suggested topics section, you will see the number of search results: 90 documents found for.. Under that, each result will be listed in order of relevance. If you did not click on the Scholarly journals box on the previous page, you may still do so here, by clicking on the grey tab at the head of the results. 3
Scan the results to find the most relevant for your purpose. Look at number 18 below as an example. The blue underlined part is the title of the article. Under article title is the author or authors. Note that authors names are always written in direct order in Proquest, so you have to invert them to create APA references. Right after the authors names is the title of the journal, magazine or newspaper. After that is the name of the city where the periodical was published (e.g. Sarasota). Ignore it for APA references. Next you will find the date of publication, and volume and issue numbers. Finally, the page number on which the article begins is given, usually followed by the total number of pages in parentheses: (19 pages). For APA references you need the first page number and the last page number, so look at the PDF article to see the last page. Under the bibliographic information about the article you will see 1, 2 or 3 links. If you see only a link saying Abstract, like in numbers 16 and 17 above, then the full text is not available for this item. Make a note of the details so you can look it up in other databases, or give it to a librarian to procure by interlibrary loan. The other links are Full text, Text + graphics and Full text PDF. Full text and Text + graphics means that it is in webpage (html) format. Always prefer PDF format if it is available (see number 18 above), because this will give you a full scanned version of the original print document, including page numbers. Page numbers are important for APA in-text references. 4
To see the full text, click on Full text, Text + graphics or Full text PDF. To see the Abstract only, click on the blue underlined title or the Abstract link. To print the article, click on the printer icon at the top left. Save a copy to your P drive by clicking the save icon second from the top left. Send the article by email to your own address or that of someone else, by clicking the email link above the printer icon. Click on the Cite this link to generate an APA reference for this article. Beware: although this feature will produce a reference in APA style, the references thus created will contain errors. You must know the APA rules in order to check these machine-generated references. Click the Mark document box if you want to save the document in a temporary folder, to email to yourself later with others all at once. Note that the citations only stay in the folder until you log out of Proquest. 5
PUBLICATION SEARCH Proquest can also be used as if its periodicals were on a library shelf. You can browse a range of issues for one title, or find a specific issue. Click on the Publications tab at the top of the page. In the search slot, type the title of the periodical you are seeking, e.g. Journal of strategic management; or type a key word strategic. You can also click on the letter representing the first word of the title, to browse the list of periodicals starting with that letter. The results will show you whether the full text is available, and exactly what years are covered. In the example to above, the Academy of Strategic Management journal is available in full text from 2003 to the present. 6
From the page above, conduct a keyword search to find articles within this journal, or click on the issue you want at the bottom (e.g. Feb/Mar 2009; Vol.13, Iss.2) to see all the articles in that issue. 7