A database is a collection of detailed records of different types of publications in a specific area. Publication types might include:
The records usually include:
They help you to see what has been published in the area you are studying and can help you with your study and your coursework.
ProQuest is a large American information provider. ProQuest provides access to content used in teaching, learning and research, including scholarly journals, dissertations, ebooks, newspapers, periodicals, and historical collections.
ProQuest is not a publisher. Instead, it is what is known as an aggregator. Aggregators provide access to content created by publishers. Everything available on ProQuest has been published elsewhere, ProQuest collects material from different publishers and makes it available on one platform, so it can create subject-specific platforms like the British Nursing Database. The problem with aggregators, however, is that content can change over time. Publications can go from full-text to abstract only to being removed from the platform all together. This doesn't happen very often, but it's important to note that it can happen.
The British Nursing Database is a full-text version of the British Nursing Index (BNI), an important bibliographic (not full text) database supporting the practice, education, and research for nursing students, nurses, midwives, healthcare professionals and the greater nursing community. In addition to the full text of journals and trade magazines, the British Nursing Database provides article titles and abstracts for hundreds of titles dating back to 1993.
Most of the content spans from 1993-present, but there might earlier documents and articles.
British Nursing Database offers a variety of content from different sources, including scholarly journals trade journals and magazines. Top titles include:
A full title list is available here. Publications can also be browsed or searched through the Publications link on the home page.
Articles include all charts, tables, diagrams, and other graphical elements.
Many publications offer full-text, but in a small number of publications, full-text may be embargoed. This means that there is a delay between the article record appearing and the full text of the article being available. For example, if a publication has a 6-month embargo on full-text, then there will be a six-month gap between records for a particular issue and the full-text appearing, so full-text for the January issue of an embargoed publication will not available until July. Sometimes embargoes are shorter, sometimes they are longer. It's not ideal, but it is what it is.
ProQuest use a service named UnPaywall to try to maximise full text availability. If full-text is not available on British Nursing Database, but is available elsewhere, you'll see 
in the article record on the search results page and
in the article record page.
Unpaywall is described in more detail in the Open Scholarly Resources section and its browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome are recommended
