Maximizing efficiency while exporting citations from Proquest

AJB003

Hi All,

I have been tasked with exporting ALL citations for 25 different advanced searches in Proquest. Each of these searches has tens of thousands of results. Thus far, the only method that seems to work is to save 100 results at a time (the max proquest will display on a page) as a ris file and then manually importing these. However, this process must be repeated hundreds of times for each search. Is there a more efficient way to utilize Zotero to tackle this task?

Thanks in advance for all suggestions.

DWL-SDCA

If "tens of thousands" means at least 20000 results that means you will retrieve at least half a million items. (I doubt if your institution's subscription will allow that.) Are you also intending to capture full text or pdf files of these ProQuest records? Are your "advanced searches" especially sensitive in an attempt to be sure that you capture everything relevant? What portion of the results of each of these screening searches will be directly relevant to your project? Weeding out less relevant searce results will almost certainly be more efficient using the ProQuest system that downloading everything to Zotero and only then getting rid of false drops.

I ask these questions because 500,000 records is at the point where Zotero begins to bog down even if your computer has a fancy processor and lots of RAM. Zotero database searches will not be speedy.

AJB003

Hi there,

Thank you for your response. The first search returned roughly 40,000 results, while some of the others are closer to 10,000 (including duplicates). At this point, the intention is to be as all-encompassing as possible, but the large majority of the results will be dropped. Due to this, I am not currently concerned with obtaining the full texts/PDF files.

I will approach those involved in the project and see if they will allow me to narrow my searches further.

DWL-SDCA

My academic interest concerns how people seek information via database queries and how they manage that information. Your situation interests me. I may be able to offer more specific suggestions if you write to me directly. I don't think there is a forum option that allows users to contact other users but I'll try to help and offer suggestions if you visit my website www.safetylit.org my email is available from the contact information link on the home page.

bwiernik

You can check multiple pages of items in ProQuest before exporting.

But if your searches are yielding 10,000+ results, I would recommend going back to your supervisor and suggesting that they need to define a more specific search. It sounds like it is yielding far too many results for any purpose. Consulting with a systematic review librarian on crafting the queries would be a good idea.