The D’Youville Library Database Detail highlights electronic resources from our collection. It covers the basic features of a selected resource including its strengths and scope with links to tutorials and related resources. This Database Detail covers Proquest Central a comprehensive, multidisciplinary database.
What is it good for?
Proquest Central is a good for a little bit of everything. As a multidisciplinary resource it covers 175 subject areas from business to religion and everything in between. It also contains more magazine and newspaper full text than any of the other databases in the D’Youville Library collection. It has an easy to use interface for a Google like search experience, but has many advanced options that allow you to focus searches by date, format and document type.
Who should use it?
It is excellent for those that need basic information to help them understand a topic. Proquest Central includes many newspapers and magazines which contain articles that are generally easier to understand than peer reviewed research articles. Perfect for those looking to fill in knowledge gaps!
Proquest Central is also very helpful for those that need to do an opinion paper. You can use the document type filter to quickly find editorials, commentaries and essays from leading magazines and newspapers from around the world.
Search Options
The basic search screen works similar to Google. Like many of our databases you will get a set of filters to the left of the search results that allow you to focus your search.
There an advanced search screen that gives you additional options for modifying your searches such as the limiters mentioned above. Advanced searchers also have an extensive set of field limiters allowing you to search within fields such as title, author, journal title and many more.
There is a filter for “peer reviewed” research articles and also one to limit searches to “Full Text” articles.
The database interface also has several options when viewing an article for creating citations, exporting citations, saving full text directly to cloud drives such as Microsoft OneDrive and Google
Learn More
D’Youville Library- Proquest Central Youtube Playlist
