This guide is aimed at students and employees who seek knowledge about searching the database.

Access to Materials Science Collection(Remote access: Choose VIA University College as your institution. Use the same login as for MyVIA. Please fill in your whole email)

• Enter a search term in the search box. The database will retrieve every document containing your word, anywhere in the text of the document.
• You can narrow your result by using ‘Limit to’ on the left side. You can e.g. limit to Peer reviewed publications, Publication date, Document type or Language.
• When you enter search terms with more than one word, e.g. engineering systems, the database will search for engineering AND systems. Both words can be anywhere in the text.
• You can use quotation marks (“ ”) to search for an exact phrase (“engineering systems”). This search will not find ‘engineering system’ in singular. Instead, you can search: “engineering system” OR “engineering systems”.
• Using Basic search is the broadest search opportunity. If you need a more specific result use Advanced search.

• You can use advanced search to create a search that is narrower and more specific because you can choose where in the text your search words most likely should be so that you will get relevant hits.
• The advanced search is built up in rows. Use the rows to build your search. See the example below.
• Combine words and rows with the operators AND (1), OR (2), and eventual NOT.
• Use the first line (3) to one word (or more words that is similar use OR between words in a line). Choose where in the text the word should be, e.g. in the abstract (4).
• Use the second line to the word (or more words that is similar use OR between words) you also want the text to be about. Then choose where this/these words should be.
• Add a row if you need it (5).
• Use search technique as operators or special characters (see below) to narrow search words as e.g. it systems.
• Use operators to specify relationships between your search terms - an operator as NEAR/n is useful. In this search it and systems can be placed in any order, within two words apart (NEAR/2 between the words), and the words should be found in abstract.

Boolean operators

AND

Look for documents that contains all of your words or phrases. Use AND to narrow your search.

Example:

AI AND training

OR

Look for documents that contains any of your words or phrases. Use OR to broaden your search or to search for synonyms.

Example: Artificial intelligence OR AI

NOT

Look for documents that contain one of your search terms, but not the other.

Example:

engineering NOT design

Proximity operators

NEAR/n or N/n

Look for documents that contain two search terms, in any order, within a specified number of words apart. Replace ‘n’ with a number. In the example, 2 means within 2 words. Used alone, NEAR defaults to NEAR/4.

Important to know: When you shorten NEAR to N, you must provide a number. For example, internet N/3 media. If you search on internet N media, ProQuest interprets N as a search term, rather than as a proximity operator.

Examples:

engineering N/2 education

social NEAR media

PRE/n or P/n

Look for documents that contain one search term that appears within a specified number of words before a second term. Replace ‘n’ with a number. In the example, 1 means the first term precedes the second term by 1 or fewer words. A hyphen (-) joining two terms within a search is equivalent to PRE/0 or P/0.

Examples:

engineering PRE/1 system

green P/3 technologies

Special characters

*

The truncation character in ProQuest is an asterisk (*)--used to replace characters either after the word, or part of the word, or within. For example, a search for farm* will retrieve documents with the terms farm, farms, farmer, or farming.

Example:

app*

Hits = 8.772.607

Finds: apps, application, apply, appeal, appropriately …

NOTE: Truncation is very broad

?

The wildcard character in ProQuest is the question mark (?)--used to replace either inside or at the right end of a word.A word in your search term can include one or more question marks to represent one or more characters.

Example:

app?

Hits = 1.152.533

Finds: app, appl., apps

NOTE: Wildcard is not as broad as truncation

You can combine searches by using Recent searches. Use this feature to build up a more complex search string.

Recent searches remain available for your current session only. You will need to save a search to keep it available during future sessions.

ProQuest records each search that you conduct during your current session. This search history is presented on the Recent Searches page.

Once you’ve done at least one search during your session, an additional Recent searches link also displays on search page.

On the result page you can choose to see Abstract or Detailed view, and have these views translated to your own language.

Export/Save document citations by clicking on Cite

Choose the correct citation style (APA 7th) and choose RIS (to use for Mendeley).

If you want to save, manage, and organize the content and supporting materials you find and create in ProQuest’s databases, you need to create an account. You can save documents, searches, make search alerts, RSS feeds, and more in My Research.

Important to know: Your recent searches are not automatically saved beyond your current session. To make them available for future sessions, you can: Save them to a My Research account.