Slide 1
In this ProQuest Dialog™ module we will see how to conduct a basic search in the engineering and technology literature and learn about some new features.
Slide 2
We'll login with our ProQuest Dialog™ user id and password. Our initial login will take us to the opening screen.
Slide 3
This is the opening screen. The top bar shows how many databases are available, and provides navigation options. From here we can conduct a search in all available databases or choose to view the industries horizontally or we can scroll down and choose a particular database to search. We will click on the icon for the industry group Engineering & technology.
Slide 4
Our topic has to do with radio frequency identification and security standards. We enter our search terms. As we type, ProQuest Dialog auto-complete offers vocabulary we might use, or we can turn off auto-complete. We click the magnifying glass or press enter to see how many records in this industry category have these terms.
Slide 5
ProQuest Dialog presents the Results page and tells us how many records fit our search criteria. Notice the suggested subjects from ProQuest® Smart Search. Certain databases provide suggested controlled vocabulary terms for related topics based on our query.
We're going to click on Search within and modify our search.
Slide 6
The search syntax allows us to use the question mark as a wildcard for one character and the asterisk for open truncation, including left-hand truncation. We're looking for gen2, an EPCGlobal RFID protocol. Asterisk global asterisk can lead us to "global" or "epcglobal" or globalization and other variations.
When the results come back we can quickly scan the titles to see if we're on the right track. ProQuest Dialog finds not only the exact terms we entered in our search, but plurals, as well.
Slide 7
We can use the date slider to narrow retrieval to specific time periods, such as a year, a range of years or months or days. By hovering over a bar, we see the number of retrieved records published in a certain range. We slide the bar tabs to the years we want and press Update; or we could click on a bar, such as one for a current range. As we narrow the range we can see the number of records by month.
From here we can narrow by particular publications, document types, subjects, classification names and more.
Slide 8
With the date update applied, we can further narrow results by ranked lists of publication titles, document types, classification terms, authors and more if we wish. By default, our results are sorted by relevance and we can sort results by date, most recent first or oldest first. We can change our duplicate document preferences by clicking Change.
Slide 9
We'll specify the order of database preferences to keep and display records when our search matches duplicate documents. Here we have numbered the databases by order of preference and we'll press Apply preferred databases.
Slide 10
The duplicate document settings have been changed and our preferred databases have been applied. We have changed our view to Detailed view where we can see highlighted terms, source-type icons, in this case showing wire feed, book and conference paper, respectively for the first three records, publication date and the database from which the records came. We'll select some records to keep and work with later.
Slide 11
A Preview link to the right of titles lets us view parts of the record for relevancy and see the context of our search terms.
Slide 12
We've selected records to view and we've clicked Selected items. We can choose how much of the records we wish to see.
Slide 13
If we are transactional customers we can read a price preview. We'll press continue to proceed to view the selected records.
Slide 14
These articles appear right on target and we can email, print, cite, export or save them as a file. The lower parts of records contain hyperlinked terms we can click to search.
When ready to go back to searching, we'll click Back to results or Search, if we wish to start a new research project.
We want to translate this abstract to French for a colleague, so we'll go back to the Results page and click on its title.
Slide 15
ProQuest Dialog has a translation feature. We want to send a French translation to a colleague in Paris. We'll click on the title of the third record.
Slide 16
On the Document page we'll click Translate.
Slide 17
A dialog box opens where we can choose to translate a record, for example, from English to French; then click the translate button (not shown).
Translation works particularly well in cases where we retrieve a record in a language other than our native tongue and we wish to see a translation.
Slide 18
The French translation appears. Note that this is an "on the fly" machine translation for your convenience and not intended as an official translation.
Records can be saved, printed, emailed, cited or exported only in their original language, so we would have to use browser file save functions or copy and paste the translation into a word-processing software to keep the translation.
Slide 19
This ends Part 1 of ProQuest Dialog — Introduction to Basic Searching.
Part 2 picks up where we left off in the same online session. We'll search one database from the Engineering & Technology category and see how easy it is to work with Selected records using a post-processing feature.
