Proquest - Lesson 4

Hooray! One click in the alphabetical list and I am at PROQUEST. WooHoo! Thank you to Jane, the techies, and everyone else who made that possible!!!

1. The search terms “Iron Deficiency” Retrieved 2363 documents.
First article listed was from CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE, dated March 2011. Second article was from THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF NUTRITION, dated Feb. 28, 2011. Both showed that abstracts were available. I was (and am) impressed by how current these results are. I had to go down to the NINTH item to find one that was dated Feb 12, 2011 which is today’s date and the same date I am searching the PROQUEST DATABASE.

The first four items in the results list had Abstracts only (no wonder considering that all their publication dates are--as of this posting, still “in the future”) but the fifth through tenth items on this first page of search results had both Abstracts and Full text capabilities.

Since these were all a bit over my head and for the sake of comparison, I considered using one of the “Suggested Topics” that shown in a box above the first page of results. Three Suggested Topics seemed to be promising: Iron and Nutrition (2363 articles) Iron and Dietary supplements (304 documents), Iron and Diet (2078 articles).

When I selected the narrower topic "Iron and Dietary supplements" I first noticed the “Narrow Your Results By: Topic, Date, Publication, About” option. Also at the bottom of that box I saw a number I didn’t totally understand that said 1-8 of 56 (sorted by number of documents). But once I clicked on the NEXT arrow and the next 9-16 narrower yet topics appeared, I understood that there were 56 different narrower terms I could select.

I selected the #16 result in the list: “Pumping Up Your Iron” in Better Nutrition (Nov 2009), available in abstract, full text, and full text PDF. This was very readable and contained useful information to a general reader like me.

I browsed through several screens of results. Most were from research publications and therefore beyond my ken, I appreciated that this caliber of current information was so readily accessible from my home computer. I can see various options on the screen by which I could change my results pages: the tabs at the top of the page, the list of DATABASES SELECTED, and the SOURCES Tabs below the “Narrow your results” options.

For example, by changing from “All Sources” (304 results) to the other source options, my results changed as follows: Scholarly Journals (255 documents); Magazines (31 documents); Trade Publications (16 documents); and, Newspapers (2 documents).

Other options on the screen include: email, cite, or export any results marked; select only the full-text items; and, sort by “most recent first” or most relevant first.”


WHAT A POWERFUL RESOURCE THIS IS. Of course, I already knew that. But nevertheless, I am impressed.


1a. THANKS to Kriscat for articulating how online professional journals can help keep us connected to other library professionals.

THANKS, too, to SMSEaglesLibrary for reminding me to check S for School in the publications list as in discussion item #2 below. (Another duh on my part!) It is VERY NICE to know that School Library Journal is on this list….Now I’ll have to check out what other titles I missed.


2. Publications.
WOW. What a list!

I started by using various library words as title first words. L for Library: 14 titles. B for Book: 3 titles. B for Bulletin took me to BCCB…from 1998 on but delayed one year, H for Horn Book, 2 titles. R for Reading: 4 titles. R for Ranger Rick: coverage ended in 2002. (Sad - that would have been good for my elementary teachers.) N for National Geographic: 5 titles but delayed three months. C for Children: 2 titles.


Soon I’m browsing lists more for both professional and personal reading titles. I find the NYTimes Book Review (WOW); various NPR editions (I’m an NPR junkie, so this great!) including Weekend Editions for Saturday, Sunday, ATC; USA Today. Much, much more than I will ever find time to read, but that is a good problem.

Then I start looking for grocery aisle magazines that I never buy but read in the beauty shop: Red Book, Sunset, Family Handyman, Better Homes and Gardens, and then I keep browsing for more. Some are on the list, some are not, and some are no longer current. None were really necessary for school/academic research but I checked anyway.

There’s a LOT here…I was impressed by what seemed like a lot of FULL TEXT notations ---but I didn’t keep an official and/or complete tally. It did seem that more titles were full text than I being so in similar lists 10-15 years ago.

I’m thinking that I might be able to first entice a few teachers to explore PROQUEST as a way to read publications that are of personal interest to them. With luck, perhaps they will then self-discover the benefits of using PROQUEST with their students in more academic endeavors.