ProQuest Central
ProQuest Central is large multidisciplinary academic database. You can access it via the database tab
or resources by subject from the Quick Links menu on the library homepage.
We will click on databases to be taken to the electronic resources A-Z, click on P for ProQuest
Central and scroll down to the link. You’ll see a quick start for how to use the database, similar to
this screencast and some information about the database.
So click on the link, at this point, particularly if you are off-campus, the University of Bolton’s eresources login may appear, enter your usual university username and password and login. ProQuest
Central consists of lots of individual databases, you could select specific ones, but it’s usually best to
search them all so tick Select All and then click on the orange button to be taken through to the
search screen. There is an advanced search option if you want to explore that.
We will do a search for “risk management” in the context of finance. I want to search for finance and
financial so I can enter financ* to pick up both words. Also you’ll notice that I’ve put risk
management in speech marks, this is because I want the database to keep the words together and
search for them as a phrase. Click search. You can see that we get an enormous amount of results –
nearly half a million! The results are displayed down the page and one of the things that ProQuest
Central does is sub-divide them into the resource type. You are going to be primarily interested in
scholarly journals so click on that to leave you with a list of journal articles.
ProQuest Central will rank the results according to relevance so the more times your search terms
appear in an article the higher up the list of results it will be. So even though you have (in this case)
over 40,000 results, just look though the first 50 or so and pick out the relevant ones.
As you look through the list of results you can mark them by ticking the box next to the title. You can
access marked results in the Selected Items folder – these will be available until you close the
browser or log out.
If you want to read a particular article, click on the full-text link, the article will open, you can print it
save it or read it on the screen. There is a lot of full-text information in ProQuest Central, but you
may find some entries with a 360 link to full text icon instead of a full-text link. This means that the
full-text of this article is not available in ProQuest Central. However, click on the 360 icon to check if
we have it in another database, if not you can order the article via Inter-Library Loans from the
Library Desk. Each article costs £2 and is posted to you.
Then you might want to go back to the search and try and narrow down your results by adding or
changing your keywords. For example you may be looking at financial risk management in a
particular sector, eg, add in “higher education” and run the search again.
You can see that we still have out selected items, and the number of results has dropped, click on
scholarly journals again to view journal articles only, so you can see a more focussed set of results.
So think about your keywords when searching, start off broad and then narrow your search down
with additional or alternative keywords.
ProQuest Central has lots of other functions so take time to explore them, for example, setting up a
My Research account.
For further help with ProQuest Central or any other electronic resources please see our range of
cribsheets and screencasts or contact the duty librarian on the Library Subject Help Desk in the
library, telephone 01204 903404, email subjecthelp@bolton.ac.uk