1. Introduction to ProQuest and Ebook Central Platforms Ali Nazari-Nouri
Training and Consulting Partner

2. Agenda: ProQuest Platform Ebook Central
Single search box, subject areas and product start pages
Search results – faceted search options, document preview and more
Right tools at the right time – spell check, cite, export and more
Advanced search
My Research
Ebook Central

3. ProQuest Platform - Search Tips
Use quotation marks (“”) to search for exact phrases.
Two word queries such as advertising campaigns are searched as an implicit AND.
Use special characters and operators to focus queries.
If a specific field is not entered with a search query, the default is to search across all indexed fields of the full record plus the full-text from ProQuest.

4. Search Tips cont…
Spelling variants enable the search engine to recognize and match differences in spelling between American and British versions of a given word such as humor vs. humour and between English and older English versions of a given word such as sing and syng when appropriate.
Lemmatization enables the search engine to recognize and match different grammatical forms of a word such as with plurals and adjectives. For example, searching for mouse will also produce hits on mice. Searching on tall will also produce hits on tallest. If you do not want Lemmatization to be applied to your search, enter your term in quotation marks “ ”.

5. Truncation, Wildcard, and Hyphen (ProQuest)
* The asterisk (*) is the Truncation character, used to replace one or more characters. It can be used at the beginning (left-hand truncation), the end (right-hand truncation), or in the middle of a word.
Example: Searching for econom* will find economy, economics, economical
? The question mark (?) is the Wildcard character, used to replace any single character, either inside or at the right end of the word. It cannot be used to begin a word.
Example: Searching for t?re will find tire, tyre, tore, etc. Searching for ad??? will find added, adult, adopt.
- Use a hyphen to indicate a range when searching numerical fields, such as Publication date.
Example: YR( )

6. Proximity and Adjacency Operators (ProQuest)
NEAR/# OR n/#
Finds documents where these words are within some number of words of each other (either before or after).
Example: computer NEAR/3 careers
PRE/# OR p/#
Finds documents where these words are within some number of words of each other in the specified order. Note: If you do not specify a number, a default value of 4 words will be applied.
Example: business management PRE/5 education 
EXACT OR .e
Used primarily for searching specific fields, like Subject, EXACT looks for your exact search term in its entirety, rather than as part of a larger term.
Example: Type EXACT(“higher education”) in the Subject field Will retrieve: documents with the subject term "higher education" Will not retrieve: documents with the subject terms of “higher education administration”, “women in higher education”, etc.

7. Basic search

8. Basic search

9. Phrase searching

10. Refining the results: adding a date filter

11. Filtering by date

12. Using the “Search Within” feature to add more search terms

13. Search Within

14. Using “Search Within”

15. Proximity operators

16. Retrieving more specific results

17. Document view

18. Saving our search

19. Saving our search

20. Saving our search

21. Advanced search – top part of page

22. Advanced search – lower part of page

23. Results page

24. Narrowing the results by peer reviewed journals

25. Narrowing the results by peer reviewed journals

26. Advanced search: Thesaurus

27. Thesaurus

28. Thesaurus

29. Thesaurus - Notes

30. Thesaurus – Qualifiers

31. Thesaurus

32. Advanced search page – using thesaurus

33. Reviewing the results

34. Creating alert

35. Creating alert

36. Creating alert - continued

37. PQDT Global

38. PQDT Global - Browsing

39. PQDT Global - Browsing

40. Publication searching

41. Publication searching

42. Publication searching

43. Recent Searches and Selected Items

44. Recent Searches

45. Selected Items

46. My Research

47. Training materials available at

48. Where to find help…
ProQuest Support Center:
Technical support:
Training webinars:
LibGuide:
Videos: