Searching Sociological Abstracts (via ProQuest)
Sociological Abstracts is available via the ProQuest database platform which provides:
Access to literature and abstracts in sociology and other relevant disciplines in the social and behavioural
sciences from a variety of sources including books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.
Access:
Click on the Databases tab in the Library Catalogue.
Under Social Sciences select Sociology. This provides access to a list of relevant databases for your
subject area.
In this case, select Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest) > Connect
You will need your normal University username and password to access databases on ProQuest.
Advanced Searching:
Select Advanced from below the page title and enter a keyword into the top search box.
Here you can use additional keywords to refine your results using the AND, OR, NOT options.
AND will return only results that contain all of your keywords. OR will return all results that contain one of
your keywords. NOT will remove results that contain the specified keywords. For example, this search will
return all results that include the word immigration along with one of the three terms: UK, Britain or England.
Advanced Searching Continued:
You can also specify where ProQuest looks for your keywords using the drop down menu on the right hand
side.
Choosing Document Title will return more relevant results by only looking for your terms in the theses,
article or report heading. You may also find the Author field useful if you already know the author of your
text.
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You may also choose to look specifically for figures and tables which searches for images and raw data,
for example graphs, tables or photographs.
Refining Searches:
Use the right hand column to sort your results by ascending or descending publication date, or by
relevance.
You can also use the right hand column to narrow your search. There are several categories by which you
can refine your results, including Source Type, Subject and Date.
Searching across multiple databases:
To broaden the search to a wider range of databases for your subject area select Social Sciences
databases from the top left hand toolbar and enter your search as before.
To broaden the search to all databases in ProQuest, select All databases or click on the ProQuest logo at
any time. This will search all 29 databases available.
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Look in the top left hand corner at any time to see the number of databases you are searching. From
this toolbar you can also see a list of the databases you are currently searching, and select change it to
manually choose the databases you wish to search.
You may find the following databases particularly useful for Sociology: ASSIA, IBSS, Worldwide Political
Abstracts
Handling Results:
Use the icons in the blue menu bar at the top of the results lists to handle your results. Select the results you
want to handle by adding a tick in the tickbox.
Selecting Cite opens a new window where you can specify a particular reference style and ProQuest will
create a citation for you, which you can then copy and paste into a document.
Select Email to send the results to yourself or your colleagues. Again, you can specify a reference style.
Export/Save allows you to send the results to reference handling software such as EndNote Web. (N.B For
EndNote Web, select Export > RIS and then save the file for importing into your EndNote Web account.)
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To save searches or results for future use, set up a “My Research” account on ProQuest. To register,
click on the My Research tab in the top right hand corner of the page, or select Save to My Research >
Create a My Research Account and fill in the details required.
Accessing Texts:
Your results will be displayed with your keywords highlighted.
Some results will display a link to the full text or a link to a PDF of the article.
Others will provide a WebBridge link, which will connect you with sources where you can find a full text.
If there is no link via WebBridge, try searching the Warwick Library Catalogue.