Results

The Results page shows you the documents that contain matches to your search words.

From this page you can:

• Read a document
• Mark documents
• View citing documents and references
• Filter Your Results
• Sort Your Results
• Change the Number of Results Per Page
• Refine Your Search
• Natural Language Searching

Read a Document

To read a document in your Results list, just click the document's title. The document will open in Citation/Abstract format.

To view a document in a specific format, click the icon corresponding to the format you want.

To view PDF documents, you need Adobe® Reader® installed on your system. If you do not have it, you can download Adobe Reader for free.

If you view a document in PDF format and the next document provides a PDF version, ProQuest will display the PDF when you click Next document. In all other cases, ProQuest will follow the order of preference described above when determining which format to display.

Mark Documents

To keep a record of the documents that you found useful, click in the box next to the document's title and number. ProQuest adds that document to the Marked Documents section of your Marked List. You can also use the Mark / Clear all on page links to mark all the documents, or clear all marked documents on the current page.

View Citing Documents and References

Your results may include a link, Cited by. This link tells you how many documents we are aware of that cited this document. Click the link to view a list of those “citing documents”, which may also be relevant to your research.

Your results may also include a link to Cited References. Click the link to view a list of the references included in the document’s bibliography.

Filter Your Results

Two options let you filter your results:

• View marked documents Click this option to view your Marked List
• Show only full text Click this option to view only the documents that are available in full text format.

Sort Your Results

The Sort results by: drop-down menu lets you select alternate sorting methods. Depending on the ProQuest collection you are working with, you can select to have your documents sorted chronologically, alphabetically, or using another sorting method.

By default, ProQuest displays your search results in reverse chronological order, with the most recently published document first.

How ProQuest Determines Relevance

For single word searches, ProQuest ranks documents by the number of times the word appears in the document.

For all other searches, ProQuest ranks documents by the frequency of each term weighted by how rarely the term occurs in the collection. documents in which an infrequent term appears are ranked higher in relevance.

Change the Number of Results Displayed on the Page

At the bottom of the page you see the Results per page drop-down menu. Use this menu to adjust the number of documents displayed on each page. You can select 10, 20 or 30 documents per page.

Refine Your Search

The Refine Search link takes you directly to the search form at the bottom of the Results page.

The appearance of the search form will vary, depending on the method you used to conduct your search. The form will show the terms you used to run your search, as well as the buttons and fields for the method you used. For example, if you used Basic Search for your original search, you'll see the Basic Search form below your search results, including the search words and parameters you used to run the search.

You can refine your search by making changes to the search form. For example, if you've found too many documents you may want to narrow your search. If you're new to finding information using electronic resources, or you'd like hints for improving your search strategies, you may want to read our search advice.

Natural Language Search

When Natural Language Searching is enabled, you can enter your search in natural language—the same way you would ask a question or speak a phrase. For example, if you want to find out about storms, you might use:

• What is the difference between El Nino and La Nina?
• Central American or Latin American storms
• hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific
• How does El Nino affect weather?

A Natural Language Search doesn't have to be a question. It can be a simple phrase.

A parser will evaluate and reformat the query in the ProQuest syntax notation. It removes most punctuation, ignores question words and endings, and performs a variety of checks that will convert your question or phrase into a query using the ProQuest syntax.