Q. How do I do an advanced search in ProQuest?

ProQuest databases default to looking for each of your keywords anywhere in the full text of articles, so it's harder to find the most relevant articles for your topic when you get many others where your topic or company is only mentioned briefly. Using ProQuest's Advanced Search form can help get more focused results. With it you can pick a field to search in from a dropdown box, so you can limit looking for a keyword to just company names (very important if your company name is a common word like Target or Apple or Amazon). You can also look for words just in the title of the article, or just in the title, abstract, or subjects, so it will be a main point of the articles found. 

Advanced Searching in ProQuest Databases

First, click on Advanced Search above the basic search box:

Next, put your search terms in different search boxes, such as a company name, or a disease in the top box, and your other topic (quality management, or a treatment for the disease) in the second box. But you will tell ProQuest where to search by using the dropdowns on the right of the boxes, where you can pick Company or Document Title, or Anywhere except full text (NOFT), which looks for words in the title, abstract/summary or list of subjects the article is focused on. See the screenshot below looking for Netflix as a major Company discussed in the article.

In the 2nd box, we're searching for Corporate culture or Organizational culture in Anywhere except full text (NOFT), which looks for words in the title, abstract/summary, and in a list of subjects the article is focused on.

Below the search terms are ways to limit your search. You should always check the Limit to box for Full text, and may also restrict the results to only Peer-reviewed articles, and can Exclude Wire Feeds (those are often short press releases, and the same one can be listed several times from different sources). You can also restrict the Publication date here to specific dates or to the Last 3 years. As you check more boxes there will be fewer articles listed.

Here is the beginning of the list of results from the search above:

Some of these are from the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times (business newspapers). If we also need some Scholarly journal articles, you can check the box on the left for Peer reviewed, and it will limit the results more, to just 4 articles. These are usually about business or management theories, or discuss several companies in one article, so they might not look as relevant. But you can apply what you learn from those articles to the company you are researching.