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ProQuest Databases is a large multidisciplinary database containing many smaller subject specific databases and it is available to all Curtin staff and students. You can search ProQuest Databases or search a particular database within ProQuest to find journal citations, abstracts and full text articles. The database you will be searching in this guide is called Health & Medical Complete but you can also use these skills for ABI-Inform Global and other ProQuest databases.
This guide will cover searching, saving and emailing references and full text articles in Health and Medical Complete. It will also take you through the steps of looking for full text in another database or in the Library catalogue using Find It. There is a section at the end of the guide on how to construct a search strategy.
The guide should take you about 30 minutes to complete. You may like to print it so you can refer to a printed copy while you are working online; it is about 7 pages long.
This guide is divided into the following steps:
Step 1 - Getting started
Step 2 - Searching the database
Step 3 - Marking some references
Step 4 - Saving your references to disk
Step 5 - Emailing your references
Step 6 - Using Find It
A simple way to access Health and Medical Complete is via the Databases A-Z link on the Library homepage. You will need to enter your Curtin ID and Password.
You can also access Health and Medical Complete via Gecko: Gateway to Library Databases (once you have logged in, select the Title tab and search for Health and Medical Complete). If you are having trouble using Gecko, you may like to look at our Online tutorial.
To access Health and Medical Complete through ProQuest Databases: All Collections, go to ProQuest from the quick link on the Library homepage. Select the Database drop-down menu on the Basic Search page with the default set to Multiple databases. Scroll down the menu and select Medical Sciences - Health and Medical Complete.
There are different methods, or levels, of searching available. The default setting is the Basic Search but you can change this by clicking on the Advanced Search or Publication tab.
Click on the Advanced Search tab at the top of the screen. The next screen will have several search boxes. This search screen enables you to enter your keywords or search terms separately in the boxes provided and choose in which parts or fields of the record you want to search.
A sample assignment topic is:
Conduct a literature search on the promotion of childhood immunisation.
We will be using Boolean searching and truncation, so if you are unfamiliar with these concepts, please see the Help with search strategies section at the end of this guide.
In the first box, type promot*
In the next search box, type child* or infant*
In the next box, type immunisation or vaccination
Make sure that AND is in the first two drop-down menu boxes on the left. This will tell the database to find references with all of these concepts.
Click the Search button.
The number of articles you have found will be shown - to help you decide whether to refine your search or not. To narrow your search further, you can select from the drop-down menus on the search page or at the bottom of your results screen. The most common limit is that of date range, scholarly journals or to full text articles. Click on the Next button to see the next page of results.
The list of articles you have found will be similar to this:
Children's charity criticises global immunisation initiative; Fiona Fleck; British Medical Journal, London; Jan 19, 2002; Vol. 324, Iss. 7330; International edition; pg. 129, 1 pgs
Each brief citation is in the same format.
Underneath the citation there may be icons that indicate the availability of the article in HTML full text format , an article in HTML full text format with graphics and the availability of the article in PDF full text format.
The title of the article is highlighted in blue, followed by the author/s, the title of the journal in bold, the year, volume, issue number and page number information.
Some articles may appear more than once as they may have been published in different journals.
Click on a Full text icon and view the full article in HTML format. Click the << Back to Results link to return to the citations.
Click on a Text and graphics icon and view the article and its graphics. Click the <<Back to Results link again to return to the citations.
Select a Full text-PDF icon to see the article in PDF format. To read this you will need to have the Adobe Acrobat software on your computer. This format has page numbers which you can cite if you want to quote from the article in an essay. Again use your <<Back to Results link to return to the brief list of articles.
Not all of the results that are displayed will be relevant to you. While you are looking at your results, you might want to select some records to save into a more manageable list. You can do this by following these steps:
Click in the box on the left hand side of any records that you want to save. A tick will appear.
To display only the marked records, click on the My Research tab at the top of the screen. This will then display a list of the records you have marked.
To unmark some articles from this list, click in the marked boxes again (this should remove the tick. To remove the citation altogether, click on Delete Unmarked Items.
Insert a USB into the relevant drive of your computer.
Mark a few references (if you have not already done so in step 4).
Select the My Research link from the top of the page. This will display only those references you have selected.
Click on the Create your bibliography link (or Export Citations for EndNote formatting).
Follow the instructions on the next screen to format the references for saving or printing. You can choose the Document summaries (citation and abstract) option or Citations only button.
From here, select Download
Click Save As on the browser's File menu, choose your USB drive (Save in:) and rename the File Name with a .txt extension, e.g. Health.txt.
Make sure the Save as Type: reads Text file (.txt) so the references can be read by a word processing program.
Click on the Save button.
Your records will now been saved onto your USB.
Use the browsers Back button to return to ProQuest .
Note: This will save your citations (the references), with or without the abstract, but not the full text of the article.
If you find full text articles and want to save the whole article you can save the article or email one or several articles to yourself.
To save the full text follow these steps:
You have two choices when saving the full text of an article in ProQuest; saving the HTML version or the PDF image. The PDF image enables you to save any graphics that are in the article.
From your list, find an article that has both a Full text (HTML) icon and a Full text - PDF icon.
Select the HTML (page) icon of your reference. This will display the full text of the article.
To save this article, select the Print link at the top of the screen. This will reformat the article for saving or printing.
After the article is reformatted, select the File option from your browser and select Save As. Have the USB drive or chosen folder selected and give your file a name. For Save as type: choose text file. Use a .txt extension and Word should be able to read it.
If graphics in the article are important, you should save the PDF version. To do this select the Full text - PDF icon of an article. This will launch Adobe Acrobat reader and display the full page image.
To save or print from Acrobat you must use the Adobe Acrobat icons, not the browser icons.
To save to a USB or a folder, click the floppy disk icon on the Acrobat tool bar and save to the USB drive, give your file a name with a .pdf extension (e.g. health.pdf) and save it (Save as type: PDF files) in PDF format.
To read this article, you will need to have Acrobat Acrobat on your computer.
To print the article, simply select the printer icon from the Acrobat tool bar.
You can email your marked list, or the full text of the articles (if available), to yourself or others. To email the full text, follow these steps:
From your marked record list (in My research), click the Email marked documents
Choose either Full text .... or Full text-PDF (if available) .
Type your email address into the box provided and any subject term (e.g. Health references).
Click on Send Email button.
The whole article will be sent to this address.
As you scroll down the results list, you may notice that some articles have an abstract and just say Find it. You will need to look for the article elsewhere.
Find It is linking software that searches other databases and the Library catalogue to see if it can find the full text of the article. For more information on Find It see the Find It FAQ.
Choose an article that has the Find it button.
Click on the Find It symbol.
A new window will open displaying the Find It record for that article. It may tell you if the article is available in full text in another database (Full text online) or Search Curtin Library Catalogue if it is in print in the Library. (Note: Often the catalogue will say the Library has a particular journal in print but you will need to check the Holdings in the record to make sure we have the right volume and year and issue you need).
To link directly to a database that has the full text, click on Full text online and you will be taken directly to that database.
For more help on using Find It, see the Find it view-it tutorial.
For this guide, you will be searching for journal articles on this sample assignment topic:
Conduct a literature search on the promotion of childhood immunisation.
You will need to search for articles that discuss all of the main concepts in this topic. Exclude words that are not likely to be useful, for instance, the words "conduct" and "literature search" are likely to be used in so many articles that they are redundant as search terms. Focus on the words that are specific to your topic.
What are the main ideas or concepts of this topic?
promotion childhood immunisation
What are some other keywords that describe these same ideas?
promoting child/ren immunization
education infant/s vaccination
How can we use these concepts or keywords in searching?
To get the best results from a database search, you have to follow some basic rules. Most databases use Boolean logic, which is a simple set of rules used to combine search terms and develop precise search queries. In Boolean logic, the words AND and OR have special meanings.
You use the word AND to search for references containing all the search terms.
For example: promotion and childhood and immunisation
You use the word OR if you want to search for references containing either one term or the other.
For example: immunisation or immunization or vaccination
For more on this, go to InfoTrekk and read Trek 1: Analysing a topic and Trek 2: Finding keywords.
The use of truncation and wildcards help simplify this process. For example truncating the word childhood with a * (i.e. child*), it will pick up children, childhood and child in one search.
Wildcards are useful when considering the different spellings of a word. If the letter in question is replaced with a ?(i.e. immuni?ation) the computer will pick up both spellings of the word.
Please note: Truncation and wildcard operators vary from database to database and you may need to check which symbol is used for the particular database you are searching. Check the database's Help section.
We hope you now feel more confident about searching a ProQuest database for your own topics. If you are not sure which database to select, librarians can help you get started and develop effective search strategies to find the information you need.
If you need more help with information searching on ProQuest or other databases please contact the Library Enquiries Desk.
