Section 8 – Searching Journal
Databases
Objectives
This section will help you:
➢ Be able to access the databases
➢ Know how to conduct a basic search of Proquest
➢ Know how to conduct a basic search of Emerald
In today’s “information society”, there is an enormous amount of information written on
different subjects. A large percentage of that information is provided in journals. In the
past, people needed to spend hours upon hours browsing through the print journals to find
articles on topics they were interested in. Today, databases make this much easier.
Databases contain references (or citations) to journal articles from many different
journals, magazines, newspapers, and in some cases, even chapters from books. When
you search a database, you are searching hundreds of different journals at the same time
for articles on your topic.
We will be looking at two databases in particular; Proquest and Emerald. However these
are not the only databases that have a business and law component. For information on
how to search other databases, go to their help or Search tips pages.
How to find a database
The University subscribes to many databases. To find them:

Go to the Library home page www.library.cqu.edu.au

Click on SearchSMART under Finding Information

There are three ways to find a database.

If you don’t know which database to choose, go to Browse Databases by
Subject and select your subject heading from the drop down box:
You will be presented with a list of subject-specific databases
Select the Marketing subject list.

The second way to find a database is to Browse Databases by Title and click
on the letter that the databases starts with
A list of all the databases beginning with that letter is then provided. Click on
the database you want.

The third way to access a database is to use the Quick Links section. In
SearchSMART, select Databases from the left hand side menu. Refer to the
Quick Links box for commonly used databases.
When trying to access a database off campus, you will be asked to authenticate
yourself by entering your student number and password (either your e.rolment PIN
or the barcode number on your student card).
Example: searching Proquest
We will now look at how to search in Proquest using the keywords we identified in the
example in section 3 – Synonyms.
Type in the keywords you have identified
Select what Boolean option you want to use (AND/OR) from the drop down boxes
My example is customer preferences AND measurement AND strengths
Click on search
Note that I have truncated the keywords measurement and searched “customer
preferences”as a Phrase.
If you need more than three rows for searching (if you have more than three keywords
you need to combine), you can click on Add a row and more rows for keywords are
provided.
Click on to provide more
search boxes
When you click on search, you will get a list of the articles that match your search terms.
We are told how many articles are retrieved and what search terms were used. In our
example search, we have too many articles to look through, so we will need to limit the
number of articles retrieved. A good way of doing this is selecting Scholarly Journals or
trade Publications, which limits the search results to articles from those types of
journals/publications only.
No. of articles
Scholarly / Trade journals
Search terms / keywords
We select scholarly or trade journals because, as outlined in Section 6.2 Journal type
definitions, these types of journals provide articles that are of higher quality and
credibility. These types of articles are preferred by lecturers in university assignments.
Having chosen scholarly journals, we get the following results:
Abstract only available via Proquest. Use the
Article Linker to check for alternative access or
check the Library Catalogue.
Fulltext article
available via
these links
Notice that record 1 has fulltext options available (full-text - PDF, or text + graphics or
Page Image- PDF). The fulltext of this article can be accessed on your computer by
clicking on the article title or the format link.
Record 2 only has an abstract available in Proquest. However, the article may be
available either in print or via another database. Click on the Article Linker button to
check if full text is available in another database.
If the article is not available via Article Linker, or if it is not available, do a Journal title
search in the CQU Library Catalogue to see if CQU Library holds the journal (as
explained in section 6).
Exercise 13
Using the keywords and synonyms you identified in Exercise One, perform a search in
Proquest. Write your search strategy here.
Example: searching Emerald
Using the same search strategy we used in Proquest (“customer preferences” and measur*
and strengths), we will search Emerald.
To use the Advanced Search Screen
Type in the keywords you have identified and select the phrase searching boxes
as needed.
Choose the fields you want to search for. Notice the drop down box has been
changed from All Fields to All Fields (excluding fulltext).
Select the Boolean terms from the drop down boxes (AND/OR)
Click on Go
Tick box to
search for
phrase
Select search fields
To access the full text of the article, select either the View HTML or View PDF link
below the citation.
You may have noticed that searching Emerald retrieved fewer results that Proquest
and the results may look less useful. This is because Emerald is a much smaller
database and the articles are catalogued in a different way to Proquest. Often the
keywords that are successful in Proquest will not work in Emerald.
To improve results are to use the synonyms you identified earlier to find more
helpful articles. Another way may be to search for keywords in different parts of
the article. For example, searching for highly relevant terms such as “customer
preferences” in All Fields (excluding full text) and searching for more common
terms such as measurement and strengths in All fields may highlight more relevant
articles.
Exercise 14
Using the keywords and synonyms you identified in Exercise One perform a search in
Emerald. Write your search strategy here.