Filtering your results means limiting the search based on certain criteria. The two that you'll want to pay the most attention to are publication date and source type.
Let's do a new search to find information about the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was legislation passed in the year 1990 that provided equal rights for disabled individuals, in terms of being able to access public services such as education. Let's find some articles about how the ADA has had an effect on nursing education. I'll type in "Americans with Disabilities Act" in quotation marks, AND "education" AND "nursing".
The left side of your search results is where you can apply filters. If you limit it to "peer reviewed" by clicking on that check box, it's mostly only going to show you articles from scholarly journals. More on that in a minute.
Let's skip "source type" for right now and go down to "publication date." You can easily filter it so that you're only retrieving articles in your search results from the last 12 months, the last 5 years, the last 10 years, or you can input a custom date range. If your topic is about technology for example, you'd probably want to be looking at more recent articles from the last 5 years, since technology changes quickly.
Okay. I'm going to click "clear all filters" and then we'll look at source type.
Before you do that, make sure you set your limit back to "full text."
In most of the library's databases, including ProQuest, everything is sorted by relevance, meaning it shows at the top of your list the article that it thinks is the most useful one. But sometimes you're going to want to find scholarly information -- which is basically studies and research. And sometimes you'll want basic information that's written for the general public -- which is usually found in magazines and newspapers. So you can filter out which source type you want, on the left. If you want to look at scholarly information, you can limit it to "peer reviewed," which is another term for scholarly information (it just means that other scholars review it for validity before it is published). And you can also just click "scholarly journals" under "source type." Now everything in your results is a scholarly journal article.
So what exactly is a scholarly journal article? Usually it's an actual study, or scientific experiment, that's been done on an issue. So here's an example of a study done about disabled students and their success in college nursing programs. Let's click on this one: "The Americans with Disabilities Act: Effect on Student Admission and Retention Practices in California."
I'm going to click on "Full text PDF" and we'll get the actual image. This is what the article looks like in the print publication. It was published in the Journal of Nursing Education.
So, we'll look at the title first. They're studying whether or not the ADA had an effect on students' ability to succeed in California Nursing Schools. Just about all scholarly journal articles have an abstract at the top. An abstract is a summary of the article. This article is pretty short, so it doesn't have an abstract. Instead, what we see is a brief introduction and a literature review, where they state the problem. In this case, they were interested in knowing how nursing schools in California are recognizing disabilities and providing accommodations for students who need them, and whether those students are successful.
They conducted their study by sending a questionnaire to disabled students at different nursing schools to gather the data, and what they found was that disabled students who are not provided accommodations struggled to stay in the program.
One thing to point out about scholarly articles is that they are sometimes limited. Although they often do provide scientific evidence in a lot of cases like in this article -- which used a questionnaire to find out how successful disabled nursing students are, this study had its limits. They only studied nursing schools in California, for example, and they only surveyed a very limited number of students. This study, also, does not attribute any cause. It doesn't talk about why disabled students specifically struggled. It doesn't talk about how colleges determine which students are the ones who receive accommodations, or what kind of programs they have to ensure that disabled students are able to succeed. So scholarly articles are sometimes very focused on facts and that's sometimes it.
If we go back to our search results, let's see if we can find an article that puts disabled nursing students' struggles into better context. For that, we'll look for a popular article -- something from a magazine or newspaper that is written to inform the public. Let's get rid of the filter for "scholarly journals" over on the left. And we'll also turn off "peer reviewed."
Now we'll click the filter for "newspapers" under "source type." Since news is constantly updated, you'll see a lot of examples of how the ADA is being followed or not being followed in different educational settings.
Let's take a look at this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Nursing Student, Disabled, Sues CCAC After Failing."
A quick glance at this article shows us an example of a student who sued a community college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after failing. The student suffered a stroke and was disabled as a result, but they received no accommodations, and they were treated badly by their instructor. This shows us a real life example of how and why a nursing student failed as a result of the way the college treated them due to their disability.
So the scholarly article showed us a study that was conducted to show just how many nursing students with disabilities are successful in the program, and this newspaper article gives us a broader context that shows an example of a student who faced discrimination within the program.
Don't forget that once you find an article, you'll need to locate the MLA citation in order to cite your source. Click on "Cite" at the top right.
The box that pops up defaults to an MLA 9th Edition citation. Copy and paste this into your Works Cited page.
So to summarize, ProQuest is a tricky database to use, but with some search strategies and using the filters, you'll have better luck finding what you need.
Now, you'll get a chance to practice finding articles about the accommodations that disabled college students have a right to ask for as part of the ADA.