ABI/INFORM

Business Subjects

ABSTRACTING, BIBLIOGRAPHIES, STATISTICS
ACCOUNTING
BANKING AND FINANCE
BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS
COMMUNICATIONS
COMPUTERS
ECONOMIC SITUATION & CONDITIONS
ECONOMIC SYSTEMS AND THEORIES, ECON. HISTORY
ENGINEERING
INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE
INVESTMENTS
JOURNALISM
LABOR AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
LAW
MANAGEMENT
MARKETING AND PURCHASING
PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PRODUCTION OF GOODS AND SERVICES
PUBLIC FINANCE AND TAXATION
SMALL BUSINESS

Inclusion Policy

Over the past year ProQuest has aggressively grown its core business databases with new journal content and the addition of more non-periodic sources such as Business Dissertations and SSRN Working Papers.

Looking forward, ProQuest will continue to invest in the platform and content delivery mechanisms to stay at the forefront of industry developments. ProQuest strategies include product development, acquisitions and licensing, and creating key content, all in-line with business school needs. ProQuest is committed to providing the broadest coverage of business information possible and will continue to add new discipline-specific products, putting greater emphasis on the profile of the researcher and customizing content and functionality for the user. Enhanced accounting contents and expanded historical contents are examples of such recent product developments, while greater author collaboration tools are also being progressed. The customization of interface features will continue to evolve to complement and bolster the strength of that content, while supporting and assisting the researcher in finding the information they need most.

ProQuest will maintain the strength not only of its current file, but also its backfile, to ensure that users researching historical business issues that may have developed over a number of years won't be left disappointed. We continue with our commitment to customers and publishers by negotiating and providing access to the right content with the least amount of embargo, if any.

Geographical Coverage

• UK
• Europe
• World

Gap Fill Policy

Wherever possible we will look at possibilities of manufacturing this content. We do not want to pass this cost onto the customer in terms of increased subscription or usage fees and therefore sometimes do have to review the cost / benefit of this exercise on a case by case basis. We will investigate all avenues to fill the gap identified.

Archive Policy

For the majority of ABI/INFORM titles, ProQuest does not systematically include or digitize early editions of journals if they are not already available in the database. We concentrate focus rather on maintaining the currency of publications.

Embargo Rules

Embargoes (whether they exist, and their duration) are determined by individual publishers on a title basis. We maintain a complete online title list facility that allows anyone to check any of our databases and titles, determine whether embargoes exist, and their length.

ProQuest strives for the lowest embargo and none at all wherever possible. We also support the publisher's right to provide their content to any number of aggregators, and therefore rarely demand exclusivity on content.

Update Frequency

Daily

Content Classification

ProQuest considers a journal as peer-reviewed if its articles go through an official editorial process that involves review and approval by the author's peers (people who are experts in the same subject area.) Most (but not all) scholarly publications are peer reviewed. Some trade publications are actually peer reviewed, but ProQuest does not consider them when filtering on peer reviewed. This is because getting results from trade publications instead of academic journals can be frustrating to researchers. Instead, ProQuest excludes these peer reviewed trade publications and only considers publications that are scholarly in terms of content, intent, and audience. ProQuest uses information provided by publishers to determine whether a publication is peer reviewed. In some cases, referenced sources such as Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory that gather information on publishers are consulted.

A Peer Reviewed/Scholarly journal as defined by ProQuest must be:

• Authored by academics for a mainly academic target audience
• Published by a recognized society with academic goals and missions
• Academic in focus with the intent to report on or support research needs as well as advance one's knowledge on a topic or theory
• Targeted for professional / academic researchers and have in-depth analysis typically focusing on one discipline or academic field
• Peer reviewed or refereed by external reviewers
• Publisher is a professional association or an academic press

Keywords and Indexes

It is a widely held belief in academic circles that the value of accurate and comprehensive indexing in electronic databases is increasing. With institutions frequently needing to search in several different databases for full text, having the tools to point you in the right direction is essential. For over 30 years, ProQuest has been the leading indexer of academic journals. Unlike other providers ProQuest use real people, professional editors and classification experts in business and management, rather than computers to assign index codes and prepare abstracts. The result? You get focussed, richly detailed, precise and accurate results and not the incomplete mass of irrelevant 'hits' provided by some other sources. ABI/INFORM has been designed to give you access to the articles you need, quickly. By implementing an appropriate specialised vocabulary we can deliver a highly focused, highly relevant list of articles on every business subject, whereas with other databases users are left to wade through pages of irrelevant articles, hoping to find the information they need.

ProQuest ® Smart Search engages our extensive controlled vocabulary, enabling users to navigate quickly to the most relevant articles. It's especially valuable for less-experienced researchers, users who are not savvy about the subject thesaurus or constructing Boolean queries. It also provides greater transparency of content in the databases being searched so more experienced researchers can refine their search strategy as they go. The same technology enables users to browse topics in most ProQuest databases. Users can browse through subjects, companies, people, and geographic locations selecting and narrowing terms to find relevant articles in an expanded number of ProQuest databases. New browsing capabilities provide enhanced access to non-periodical content, which has become a mainstay in today's research environment. Users can browse through complete report sets from the following collections by accessing through Publication Search and from the database selection screen.

ProQuest IntelliDocs™ technology offers a smart document linking capability that expands the amount of information available to searches. ProQuest IntelliDocs™ recognises people, places, companies and organisations, which have been highlighted in the full text of the articles found in ProQuest. They are hotlinked to corresponding entries in a wide range of additional sources such as Hoover's Company Profiles, external websites and even related holdings in a library's OPAC. Users move seamlessly from ProQuest to other sources, then back again.

You can further qualify Basic and Advanced searches with the qualifiers listed following.

• Author. Search for articles written by a particular author.
• Company Name. Search for a company or organization featured prominently in an article.
• Document Title. Search for text in the title of the document.
• Subject Terms or Code. Search for terms that identify the content of a document.
• Publication Type. Search only for publications of type scholarly, magazine, trade publication, or newspaper.

Special Fields

• Abstract. Search for text in the document abstract.
• All Indexing. Search using all indexing.
• Article type. Used to define articles by the kind of information they contain (biography, recipe) or the way that information is presented (news, editorial).
• Author Affiliation. Search by academic affiliation of the author.
• Caption. Search for text in the caption of the document.
• Classification Code. Search using the ProQuest Information and Learning classification code.
• Classification Name. Search using the general ProQuest Information and Learning identifier.
• Company Name. Search for a company or organization featured prominently in an article.
• Date (alpha). Search for documents based on a date in alphabetical format (for example, December 1 1995).
• Date (numeric). Search for documents based on a date in numeric format. See "Options for Searching by Date" below.
• Document Column Head. Search for the title of a column in a periodical, such as "The Week in Review." This field finds all documents where the search words are in the column head.
• Document Type. Search for documents of a particular type.
• DUNS. Search for numbers assigned by Dun & Bradstreet.
• Footnote. Search for text in the footnote of the document.
• Geographic Name. Search for a location that is the subject of the document.
• Headnote. Search for text in the headnote of the document.
• ISBN. Search for documents with a particular ISBN number.
• ISSN. Search for documents with a particular ISSN number.
• NAICS/SIC Codes. Search for NAICS/SIC codes associated with companies featured in a document.
• Personal Name. Search for an individual prominently discussed.
• Product Name. Search for brand names of products featured in a document.
• Source. Search a particular publication.
• Ticker Symbol. Search for US stock exchange ticker symbol.
• Words. Search for documents less than or greater than a given word count.

Options for Searching by Date (may vary by database)

• Past 7 Days. Articles published in the past 7 days.
• Past 30 Days. Articles published in the past 30 days.
• Past Year. Articles published in the past year (365 days).
• Before a Date. Articles published before a certain date.
• After a Date. Articles published after a certain date.
• Between Two Dates. Articles published between two specific dates.

Authority Files

We use a proprietary, hierarchical vocabulary that is developed from the language employed in source publications. At most recent count, the ProQuest Controlled Vocabulary included nearly fifteen thousand entries (over ten thousand subject descriptors and nearly five thousand "used for" references). Additionally, we maintain almost fourteen thousand "broader term," "narrower term," and "related term" relationships, and approximately 2,500 terms include scope notes defining how the term is used.

With so many vocabulary entries, our level of indexing detail is quite high. This allows researchers to develop searches that will retrieve only the most relevant citations.

Our thesaurus is a continuously evolving work. We add terms several times a year following a thorough review of need based on the literature. To be added to our thesaurus, a term must be relevant and of lasting value. Additionally, we add new scope notes and "use" references frequently to enhance the ease with which editors and researchers can employ the thesaurus in their indexing and searching.

In addition to the controlled subject vocabulary, we maintain authority files containing hundreds of thousands of corporate entries, personal names, geographic terms (in some cases, down to the neighbourhood level), and product names. New names are added to these files daily. All of these are available as index entries.

Citation Linking

Open URL compliant

Library customers who subscribe to selected electronic journals can link directly from ABI/INFORM citations to full text in these journals and back again, without leaving the database.

You can create links to a variety of resources with ProQuest, including:

• Ejournals
• Catalogues
• Document delivery services
• Link resolvers

Our current linking partners include:

E-journals:

• Ingenta
• CrossRef
• OCLC Full-Text
• Swetswise

Catalogues:

• OCLC WorldCat
• library OPACs

Document delivery services:

• Infotrieve
• OCLC ILL

Link resolvers:

• Article Linker™ by Serials Solutions
• SFX by Exlibris
• LinkFinder by Endeavor Information Systems
• WebBridge by Innovative Interfaces Inc.

Full Text Linking

ProQuest is an OpenURL Target and OpenURL Source compliant with the San Antonio Profile Level 1 (SAP1). ProQuest OpenURL technology allows users to access, from external sources, full text articles not available in ProQuest. You can create title-level or article-level links to resources of all types-to any library OPAC, e-journals, and link resolvers.

ProQuest finds the article citation and displays a "linking" icon. When a user clicks on this icon, the full text article from your library's other holdings is displayed. You can even specify a custom format for a dynamic URL, and ProQuest will populate the link with the article's bibliographic information.

ProQuest OpenURL provides links to any resource (for example, e-journals, catalogs, document delivery services, and link resolvers) that is OpenURL compliant. Click here for more information about ProQuest linking capabilities.

Additionally, we can provide custom linking and e-journal management solutions through our Serials Solutions brand. With our E-Journal A.M.S. service, you can employ a variety of access and management tools to find e-journals, learn more how your patrons access your e-journal collection, and better understand overlap within your collection. We can also load comprehensive and customizable MARC records into your OPAC, and provide your patrons with a full-featured OpenURL link resolver that links to full text articles and to your entire collection. Each service is supported by an underlying knowledge of e-journal metadata that is unparalleled within the industry.

We also provide dedicated customer service teams that specialise in creating custom linking solutions to meet individual customer needs.