Some ProQuest database products, such as Nursing & Allied Health Database, and ABI/INFORM Global offer browsing—in addition to searching—as a way of finding content.
Important to know: When you’re using browse, you are simply clicking links to ultimately reveal relevant documents in a results list. Unlike searching, you don’t enter any words or phrases as search terms.
More than one browse experience
The browse experience can vary, depending on the database product and the nature of the content. Some examples of the browse experience in ProQuest include:
- Topic exploration — Browse an editorially defined topic and subtopic presentation such as Study Paths in Nursing & Allied Health Database
- Subject exploration — Browse an editorially defined directory of subject terms, for example ABI/INFORM Collection
- Specific Content exploration — Such as Industry and Market Research in ABI/INFORM Collection
Some database products offer more than one of these experiences when you click Browse in the main navigation.
Click links, discover content
Study Paths in Nursing & Allied Health Database are presented as a hierarchical organization of broad nursing-related topics. When you click one of these broader topics you expose related, more focused subtopics. As you continue to click deeper into one of these topic study paths, you ultimately reach a View documents link. When you click that link, a list of relevant documents—selected by nursing professionals—displays.
Find a topic
Some database products, such as the Daily Brief Service in Business Market Research Collection, provide a search box and Go button to let you search for a topic within an editorially built hierarchy of topics or subjects. The Go button returns a list of matching (if any) topic or subject links.
Breadcrumbs and topic/subject exploration
If you are browsing a topic or subject hierarchy of links and then display a document from the results list, the trail of links you clicked to find that document may be presented at the top of the document view. This trail is often called a breadcrumb trail.
A sample breadcrumb trail might look like this.
Business & Industry > Accounting & taxation > Accounting > Accounting methods > Cost accounting >
You could click any link in the trail to return to that place in the overall topic structure.