I searched a few relatively narrow science topics (including sleeping beauty and gene knockout) and got nothing. I have searched these successfully on Google, so it was surprising to me that I got nothing from Proquest. Next I tried "University of Minnesota Twin Studies" and received many hits but of low relevance. I opened one that looked promising, then found a box labeled "Find more documents like this" on the right side of the screen, and chose "Twins." The articles switched to all being about the Minnesota Twins baseball team. I gave up.
I started over searching "daughters of the confederacy." I got 47 full-text results, all of which were relevant. I read several of them: they loaded easily and had few typographical problems. One disappointment was that the abstracts were consistently poor. They were often the first few lines of the article; occasionally they read like "teasers" to lure you into the article. An abstract used to be a carefully crafted synopsis of the most important information in the article; its purpose was to save a person from having to read an entire article just to discover it was not quite germaine to the topic one was researching. These abstracts did not serve that purpose.
Using the publications tab, I looked for current information regarding the CSPC finding of unsafe lead levels in ink in childrens' books published prior to 1985. I searched to no avail for: "library collection weeding", "toxic ink", and "MUSTY." Then I searched "library" and got links to 23 journals. I hghlighted one, then searched "weeding." I got nothing, and I could not find my way back to the results list. This went on for quite a while. I began using the "Narrow your results" box, and eventually stumbled into a few articles, but nothing very current.
I have a lot to learn about searching in Proquest. It appears that if you have a specific topic like "Thomas Jefferson" it works well. But if you have more obscure topics, indentifying search terms is difficult. A thorough patron interview about the topic that would bring up an array of possible search terms would seem to be essential to locating pertinent information.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hmmm....Thanks for your comments, Avid. I'm not sure why you didn't get results, but I found several full-text articles about sleeping beauty by typing "sleeping beauty science." (I put "science" to differentiate from the fairy tale.) I also got lots of results for gene knockout, including a 4/30/2010 article out of Genomics & Genetics Weekly.
ReplyDeleteThe publications tab is useful for searching for a journal by title. Any keyword you use will search journal titles. From those results, you can search for specific articles. Librarians and teachers use this for professional reading purposes.
As you noted, some abstracts are better than others. Proquest uses the abstracts provided by scholarly journals, but for popular or trade titles that don't have abstracts, they pull information from the first lines of the article. Those are more like teasers than actual abstracts.
I encourage you to try Proquest again. Most librarians, teachers, and high school-college students find it an easy-to-use all-purpose resource.
Give us a call if we can help you with this or any other resource.