ProQuest One Business

CONTENT

ProQuest One Business was created with input from faculty and students in business schools, as well as librarians; it’s aimed at an audience of faculty, students, and researchers. Users will find company, industry, market, and country reports; scholarly journals; ebooks; videos of case studies, training programs, and interviews with business leaders; SWOT analyses; forms and templates for aspiring entrepreneurs; and full-text versions of publications such as the Wall Street Journal , the Economist, and the Financial Times. In sum, this is a rich business library with millions of full-text items about national and global matters across a range of business disciplines.

Although the resource is intended primarily for academic and specialized business library users, the content supports a wide range of learners and is accessible through library discovery services and Google Scholar.

USABILITY

The landing page is clean and easy to use, similar to the ProQuest Academic One homepage. At the top of the screen are icons to retrieve recent searches, view selected items, choose language preferences, and seek help and support. The landing page has links for navigating the database: basic and advanced search, “publications,” “browse,” and “change databases.”

Clicking on “publications” in the header will link users to all 35,000-plus offerings (including scholarly journals, books, newspapers, and magazines). Users can filter by publication type, author/editor, publication subject, and publisher.

Clicking “browse” leads to a page listing company, industry, and country reports and to company topic pages.

“Change databases” lets users access other ProQuest databases to which their library subscribes simultaneously, by group, or individually.

Below the search bar are five tiles spotlighting popular publications, company topic pages, industry and country reports, featured ebooks, and featured video collections.

A large basic search bar can be found in the middle of the page. Users can search for all materials or filter by options such as “scholarly journals,” “company reports,” “industry/country reports,” and “newspapers.” Just below it are options for limiting results to full text or, in the case of scholarly journals, to peer-reviewed titles. Nearby are links to recent searches and search tips.

Browsers can tailor advanced searches by applying Boolean terms, with options to add rows, limit results to full-text and/or peer-reviewed articles, and search by publication date, business subject, corporation, industry term, source or document type, and more. Also available is a thesaurus to help users look up the database’s controlled vocabulary.

Besides the variety of outstanding searchability features, the interface is quick to load and easy to use, with instantaneous responses to commands. Navigation is smooth, and finding desired results is straightforward.

PRICING

Costs are determined by the size of the library or school, and by the number of prospective users. Interested libraries should contact ProQuest for pricing information specific to their institutions.

VERDICT

This outstanding one-stop business gateway enables users to find books, company reports, journals, videos, conference proceedings, and much more. Featuring an abundance of content, the database is intuitive, with a combination of no-frills features and options. These tools, along with exceptional searchability, navigability, functionality, and usability, make ProQuest One Business an excellent choice for faculty and students at colleges and universities, and their nearby business communities. Similar business databases to consider are Factiva from Dow Jones, and EBSCO’s Business Source Complete.

Rob Tench is a Librarian at Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, VA.