Proquest Help (Advanced Search)
Below is a screenshot of a search for recent Consumer Reports articles on dishwashers. The numbers on the screenshot are links to the matching explanations. Many of the concepts explained here were discussed in either the Basic Proquest help page, the general Database help page 
or in the Useful terms page. Important words or concepts are linked to their explanation in the Useful terms page.
1 - The orange tab indicates we are using Advanced Search. It is "advanced" because you can be more specific in choosing search types and you can use Boolean operators more easily.
2 - We are using three different search terms as well as three different search types (explained in 3 below). "dishwasher*" in the top box is using truncation to search for plurals and the like (if we had been smart, we would have used "dishwash*"). The other two search terms, "dishwashing machines" and "consumer reports" are linked using Boolean operators (explained in 4 below).
3 – We are using three different search types. In the advanced Proquest search, these are chosen from the drop-down menu that appears when you click on the little arrow. In the first line, we are looking for variations on the theme of "dishwasher" in the citation and the abstract. In the middle line, we are looking for the subject, "dishwashing machines." If you click on the "Browse Subjects" link, it will open up a new window that will let you search for more subjects and add them to the search. In the last line we limited the search to the publication title, "consumer reports."
4 - These drop-down menus allow us to choose which Boolean operators we are going to use. Here we are using both and and or. The "or" is telling the database to look for articles that have either variants of the word "dishwasher" in the citation and abstract or "dishwashing machines" as a subject "and" were published in "consumer reports."
5 - We limited the date range so that we won't get ancient Consumer Reports reviews of hand towels. Depending on what you are looking for the date range feature can be useful. Limiting your search to dates before a movie version of book was released might be useful in finding book reviews, for example. Of course, keep in mind that the databases do not go back in time forever. In fact, it is highly unlikely you would ever find a review of hand towel models, because such articles, if they ever existed, would be too old to be included in a database.
6 - In this case, we did not check the Scholarly Journals box because Consumer Reports is not a scholarly journal. If, however, you were writing a paper on the origins of the Iraq War, then checking Scholarly Journals would be a good way to filter out piles of newspaper and weekly magazine articles. See also full text.
7 - Clicking on "More Search Options" will expand the page, giving you additional places to enter search terms along with search type options such as People or Company.
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