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Glossary Item Box

Are you looking for a particular document? Maybe all you have is part of the title, or the author’s name, or maybe you just have an ISBN or ISSN number? Do you have a bibliography, and want to quickly check whether cited references are available in ProQuest? You’ve come to the right place. Just enter as little or as much as you know about each document, and let ProQuest do the rest.

Special characters for special purposes

These characters can come in handy when you're looking for documents that contain words that can be spelled different ways, such as color or colour, or words that begin with the same character string, such as nursed or nursing.

Character Description Example
? Wildcard character - used to replace any single character, either inside or at the right end of a word. Multiple wildcards can be used to represent multiple characters. nurse?
Finds: nurses, nursed

sm?th
Finds: smith and smyth

ad???
Finds: added, adult, adopt
*

Truncation character (*) - one * for many characters. Use the truncation character at the beginning (left-hand truncation), the end (right-hand truncation), or in the middle of search terms.

To specify a specific upper limit for term expansion, use term[*N]. The default range is 0-10 characters.

nurse*
Finds: nurse, nurses, nursed

colo*r
Finds: colour, color

*old
Finds: told, household, bold

[*5]beat

Finds: upbeat, downbeat, offbeat, heartbeat 

$n or [*n] $n and [*n] are equivalent operators used to denote up to how many characters you want to truncate.

nutr$5, nutr[*5]
Finds: nutrition, nutrient, nutrients

< Less than. Used for numeric fields like publication year. YR(<2005)
> Greater than. Used for numeric fields like publication year. YR(>2005)
<= Less than or equal to. Used for numeric fields like publication year. YR(<=2005)
>= Greater than or equal to. Used for numeric fields like publication year. YR(>=2005)
- Use a hyphen to indicate a range when searching numerical fields, such as Publication date. YR(2005-2008)

Autocomplete -- search term suggestions as you enter your search

If enabled by your administrator, autocomplete provides suggestions from previously successful searches by ProQuest users. The list changes as you type, to match previous searches that start with what you have entered at any point. Click any term in the list to immediately search for that term.

You can click the Turn off auto-complete link to disable search term suggestions for your current ProQuest session.

 

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