ProQuest Central review
Broad institutional access to scholarly, professional, and research content.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
ProQuest Central is a multidisciplinary academic research database for students, faculty, researchers, and libraries. It brings together full-text scholarly journals with dissertations, working papers, conference papers, case studies, market reports, country and industry reports, newspapers, magazines, and trade and professional publications. Coverage spans business, health and medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities, education, science and technology, and religion, making it suited to institutions supporting varied research needs.
Its main strength is breadth paired with structured discovery. Precision search helps users navigate different content types within one ProQuest platform, while ProQuest Research Assistant adds AI-assisted research to the database experience. The collection also connects with Ebook Central and Academic Video Online, giving institutions a broader Clarivate ecosystem around books and academic video. This combination should appeal to libraries that want one research environment covering both scholarly literature and practical or contextual materials such as newspapers, magazines, market reports, and working papers.
Pricing follows a contact-sales model, so ProQuest Central is positioned for institutional procurement rather than individual, open-access use. Access is web-based, and the product is not open source. Institutions choosing it should be prepared to evaluate an academic database subscription around their existing library access model and research priorities. It is a strong fit for universities and academic libraries that value multidisciplinary full-text coverage and varied research formats; researchers seeking a standalone personal database or an open-source option should consider a different approach.
ProQuest Central pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Full-text coverage across multidisciplinary scholarly journals
- Includes dissertations, reports, newspapers, and conference papers
- AI-assisted research with ProQuest Research Assistant
- Where it doesn't
- Pricing follows a contact-sales model
- Web access only
- Designed for institutional rather than open access
ProQuest Central fact sheet, pricing and score →
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