The ProQuest system of databases provides access to articles published in thousands of magazines, journals, and newspapers in a variety of disciplines. While ProQuest's database collection can be accessed by specific subject, for example, education, business, psychology, etc., the ProQuest Research Library database provides researchers with results in multiple disciplines within the same database.

"From business and political science to literature and psychology, ProQuest Research Library™ provides one-stop access to a wide range of popular academic subjects. The database includes more than 3,700 titles—over 2,500 in full text—from 1972 forward. It features a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers. This combination of volume and scope makes it one of the broadest, most inclusive databases ProQuest has to offer.

ProQuest Research Library consists of two components: a core list of periodicals; plus 15 supplemental subject-specific modules. Subject modules include:

• Arts
• Business
• Children
• Education
• General interest
• Health
• Humanities
• International
• Law
• Military
• Multicultural
• Psychology
• Sciences
• Social science
• Women’s interest

ProQuest Research Library is designed to cover the top 150 core academic subject areas—and cover them extensively—so not only is it an invaluable database for a number of  different academic disciplines, it’s also accessible to readers and researchers at every level."
Source: ProQuest product description, available http://www.proquest.com/products_pq/descriptions/pq_research_library.shtml.

The following screen snapshots illustrate how to get to the ProQuest Research Library and how to search for information using the system.

**Since this document contains many screen snapshots and is fairly lengthy, the following links will help you skip quickly to specific bits of information.

Getting Started

Advanced Search

Topic Search

Finding Articles Using ArticleLinker

Getting to ProQuest Research Library

ProQuest Research Library is listed in the library's databases subject guide as one of the General databases. Research Library's multidisciplinary coverage makes it an excellent choice for launching nearly any research inquiry. Because of its variety of publications, from journals, to magazines, to trade journals, it can provide everything from very basic coverage of a topic to in-depth scholarly coverage. To find Research Library, from the library's website go to the "Databases by Subject" link and choose the "General" category. Research Library is one of the first four listed databases.

Beginning a Search

The default opening screen for Research Library is the Basic Search screen. Here a researcher can enter a single topic or multiple topics to search all articles indexed in the database. By default, the database searches through the article citations (author, title, journal title, abstract, etc.) and the full text of the articles for matches to the entered topics.

The following screen demonstrates a basic search entry in Research Library.

In the example, we are trying to find out if there are any articles about the use of cell phones on airplanes. The intent is to find out if there are regulations barring the use of cell phones or if air carriers have any policies regarding the use of cell phones. We've entered "cell phones" in quotes to indicate that it should be searched as a phrase and we've used the AND connector to indicate that we want all the cell phone articles retrieved to also mention the word airplanes. The first screen of the search results follows.

The search results are displayed most recent articles first by default. The results can also be sorted by relevancy, which arranges the articles according to which are most likely to focus on the topics entered. To change sorting from most recent to most relevant, make the selection using the pull-down menu to the right of the yellow title bar just above the article listing.

The brief display pictured above provides the article title, highlighted and underlined, the name of the publication where it was printed, bolded, the place of publication, the date of publication, and the volume, issue number, start page, and total number of pages for the article. Following the article citation are options for viewing the full article. Full text may be available in plain Web format (Full text), in Web format with original graphics included (Text + Graphics), or in print format (Page Image - PDF). When available, the PDF format is the most accurate copy of the article. Additionally, many articles will have summaries, or abstracts. For articles that are not available in full text directly through Research Library, try using ArticleLinker to track down a copy of the article in another library database or in the library's catalog.

Often a researcher will want to limit search results just to scholarly journals. The publication type tabs just above the article results allow switching between "All sources," "Scholarly Journals," "Magazines," "Trade Publications," and "Newspapers." Academic projects arae usually better researched using scholarly publications.

The following screen shows the same result listing limited to "scholarly journals." Notice that instead of 280 articles, we now have only 26 articles in our result listing. All of the resulting articles should come from so-called scholarly journals, many of which are refereed or peer-reviewed.

Because the default search in Research Library digs deeply into the full text of the articles, many of the matches that we get will not necessarily be very good matches. All the articles retrieved will have both of our search conditions, but the matches may be on isolated mentions of our search terms rather than on in-depth coverage. For this reason, the first search that we enter may not provide the best results.

To achieve better search results, we will look at relevant articles for contextual clues that can help to improve our search results. In the articles that we've found so far, instead of "cell phones" the database refers to these devices as "cellular telephones." We can also see under the Suggested Topics listings that another possible search term is "wireless communications." We can try these additional search terms to further refine our search. Additionally, "airplanes" might not be the best choice of terms to describe what we're looking for. We'll try "airlines" as another possibility.

Using the Advanced Search

With all of this in mind, we'll use the Advanced search in Research Library to try to get better search results. Our new search uses the key terms "cellular telephones" and "airlines."

The Advanced search screen in Research Library accommodates entering more complex searches and even supplies the Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) in convenient pull-down boxes for us. To the right of each input box, we also have the option to select where to search for the information. By default, we search the article Citation and document text, but we can also search:

• Citation and abstract
• Abstract
• Author
• Company/Org
• Document ID
• Document text
• Document title
• Document type
• Image caption
• Location
• NAICS code
• Person
• Product name
• Publication title
• Section
• Subject

These other options can be useful when we need to perform more precise searches. For example, if we already knew an author's last name and the general subject matter that I wanted to find, we could limit our first search input box to the Author option and the second search box to the Subject option and get a very exact match on articles on that particular subject by the specified author.

Our sample search above resulted in 70 matches. The beginning of the search result screen follows.

The first couple of articles don't really look like they pertain to our topic, but we can read the abstracts for each and decide whether to view the full articles. As we browse farther down the listing, we'll find our first clear match at article number five.

This article, entitled "Yammering Aloft," looks as though it would deal with the use of cell phones on airplanes. Published in the trade journal Air Transport World, the article is very recent (November 2005) and is four pages in length. We can see from the listing that there is also an abstract for the article, so we'll read the abstract first to determine whether or not to pull the full article.

From the abstract we can tell that this article deals with problems associated with cell phone use and with already documented cases of "air rage," which might be another topic that would be relevant to our search. The abstract also informs us that the U.S. Congress is currently conducting hearings into whether to approve an FCC recommendation to permit the use of cellphones on commercial aircraft. Based on the abstract, we'll probably find the information in this article useful and will want to browse the full text.

Since this article has information that is useful, we'll want to find other articles like it. Research Library offers an option to do just that. Most of the articles will have a link at the top of the listing labeled "More like this." Selecting this option will take us to a selection window that lists the subjects covered in the article and other selectable links. The following screen shot shows the additional selections available from the "Yammering Aloft" article. We've selected two of the listed subjects: Cellular telephones and Airline industry. Notice that we could also limit to the database Classification Codes, to Locations, to Authors, to Document types, to Language, and to Publication title, just by selecting the check boxes to the left of each of the terms. For example, if we wanted to limit our research just to articles dealing with the use of cell phones on airplanes in the United States, we could choose either the United States classification code or the location United States as a further limit.

The result of our new selection is much more specific than any of our previous searches and the results, at a glance, look relevant.

At this point, we have only 6 articles, all of them dealing specifically with cell phone use on airplanes. We'll likely need to follow up in other databases to find additional information, but this is a good start.

Using the ProQuest Topic Search

So far we have looked at doing a basic search, reviewing results, and using information gleaned from our review to perform an advanced search in ProQuest Research Library. While these are valid ways of working with the system, there are other approaches as well. An additional helpful way of identifying terminology that will achieve results in the database is to make use of the Topics search.

In the screen shot below, notice that we've selected the "Topics" tab at the top of the Research Library screen. This gives us a look-up option that will search through the entire database for topic matches and make suggestions for successful searches. This is particularly useful when we're uncertain about how a topic will be described in the database (as in our example above, we could use "cell phone," "cellphone," "cellular telephones," etc., with varying results). It can also be useful if we're uncertain of the exact spelling of a term. The Topics search will give us an alphabetical listing of close matches to whatever term we type in.

In the search pictured above, we have selected cellular as a starting query and have chosen to direct the search into subject, company/org, location, and person information instead of keyword. The resulting decision screen follows.

On this screen, we have a number of topic suggestions that we can pursue. To further narrow the range of available materials, we can follow the "Narrow by related topic" link under Cellular telephones. The result is an additional decision screen that produces an alphabetical list of related topics and which is also searchable. Notice in the screen below that we have chosen to search for ("Jumpt to") the word air. This allows us to browse for any topics that begin with this word, thus airplane, airplanes, airline industry, airlines, etc.

The resulting list has an option to narrow the cellular telephones search to documents that also include airlines as a sub-aspect. To view those documents, we will click on the "View documents" option. To narrow further, we can click on the "Narrow by related topic" option.

Once we have decided that our search is adequate, we can click the "View documents" option to begin previewing the articles that match our search criteria. For this particular combination, we have a total of 14 relevant articles. We will still have to review the abstracts to get a better sense of how relevant the articles are to our particular topic, but they all should focus on cell phones and air travel at this point.

Finding Articles Using ArticleLinker