Using ProQuest to Get You Through the Holidays
Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or any other holiday, the Penn State Alumni Library can help you find high quality sources of information to help you celebrate.
The ProQuest Online Research Library includes a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers. This combination of volume and scope makes it ideal for use by the seasoned scholar as well as the occasional recipe-seeker.
There are two main ways to search in ProQuest: Basic and Advanced. Basic searching will search anywhere in the database for occurrences of words you type in the search box—this is similar to the way you search the web using Google, and is also known as “keyword searching.” Advanced searching, on the other hand, might take a few seconds more but your search results will likely be more relevant. To do an Advanced search, simply click the “Advanced” tab at the top of the search interface:
One of the powerful benefits of databases like ProQuest is that each article is professionally indexed. This means that articles are reviewed by indexers and assigned subject terms from a controlled list of subject terms. These subject terms help you to identify what an article is truly about, better than simple keyword occurrences can. For example, if you were looking for articles about Christmas, and just typed in “Christmas” to search as a keyword, you might find some good articles, but they'd be mixed in with business articles that mentioned sales forecasts for the Christmas season, and other non-relevant mentions. If you searched "Christmas" in the "Subject" field, your results would be more focused
Here’s how to do it: Say you wanted to look for good recipes for the Christmas holiday. Type in “Christmas” in the first field, and “recipes” in the second. Change the field you want to search in from “Citation and abstract” to “Subject.”
It’s as simple as that! Here are some other good subject terms to search. You can mix and match them to achieve different results:
- “Christianity”
- “Christmas”
- “Hanukkah”
- “Holidays & special occasions”
- “Jewish holidays”
- “Judaism”
- “Kwanzaa”
- “Recipes”
- “Religion”
- “Rites & ceremonies”
- “Social life & customs”
- “Traditions”
Happy holidays!
contributed by Jeff Knapp, M.S.L.S.Reference and Instruction Librarian
Penn State Altoona
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