Step by Step with Proquest Science Databases

Proquest Science Journals, Biology Journals, and Health and Medical Complete, offer a wide variety of full text article for a wide range of science, technology, and health-related topics. This handout gives you a tour and demystifies basic searching of all three databases.

1) Choose a database: Science Journals covers physical science, technology, and engineering. Biology Journals covers life science, environmental topics, and agriculture. Health and Medical Complete overs physiology, genetics, life science, and disease in both humans and animals. Proquest does NOT have an equivalent to Academic Search Complete, and their subject databases overlap only partially. For a lot of sources, search several databases.

2)From the library web page, http://library.gsu.edu 3) Choose your database's first letter from the alphabet below the big search box.. 4)Scroll down to your database. Click its blue link to begin searching.

5) Now, arrange your topic so your database understands it. Many science topics have two main ideas. If you are interested in the health effects of cell phone radiation, your main ideas may be: "cell phone*" and radiation.

This becomes the search: "cell phone*" AND radiation.


The AND is not a word but an operator that gets the overlap between two main ideas. The "quotes" bind the phrase,"cell phones" together, and the * retrieves single and plural words.

6) Type in your search, and click the turquoise Search button with the white magnifying glass to launch your search.

7) ProQuest presents results in groups of twenty (see below). 8) To get only newer articles, shift the left slider in the turquoise graph on the left of the page. 9) To get only academic journals check off a box under Source Type, on the left side of the page. 10) To get only magazines and/or trade journals check off a box under Source Type on the left side of the page.

11) ProQuest offers hints for subjects in the pale gray strip above your search results.

12) Each individual article also features its subject headings with check boxes on the right.

13) To obtain a PDF of the article, click its very, plain looking PDF tab. 14) To print click the print icon in the box on the right of the article's page. 15) You can also email an article to yourself by clicking the email icon which is in the same box as print. 16) You can also save your article to a flash drive in a variety of formats by clicking the three dots and the word, More in the print icon box. 17) And ProQuest lets you set up an account to save articles in the cloud. Click the three dots and the word, More to learn how.