ProQuest One Sustainability successfully orients users in the subject of sustainability and connects them with content at all levels of complexity. But the quality of the historical material varies, and some of the content is freely available elsewhere.
When the ProQuest One initiative launched ProQuest One Academic in 2019, it was touted as the first in a series of products that would present research material in a way that “keeps less-experienced researchers from getting overwhelmed while still maintaining power for those further along in their academic journey” (ProQuest, 2019b).
ProQuest One Literature and ProQuest One Business followed in the intervening years.
Now we have ProQuest One Sustainability, which came to market late in 2024 (Clarivate, 2024). It is designed to be a central, unified hub for sustainability research that spans disciplines in the physical and social sciences.
For users of the ProQuest Academic platform, much of the navigation, searching, and viewing functionality of ProQuest One Sustainability will feel familiar. The highly visual interface presents content across multiple format types and provides multiple access pathways to meet different user needs or preferences. In addition to being curated based on subject, material on ProQuest One Sustainability is also organized around the three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Figure 1).
At the time of this review, 90 percent of the scholarly journals (3,585 of 3,971 titles) and 95 percent of the ebooks (7,645 of 8,013 titles) on the platform were in English.
Representation of journal publishers is weighted toward familiar heavy hitters: by publication count, the top three are Springer Nature, Wiley (listed under multiple subsidiaries), and Taylor & Francis. The publisher list for ebooks is more varied.
ProQuest plans to periodically remove content from the subscription. Changes to continuing resources will be reported on a quarterly basis; changes to ebook content from the Sustainability Book Collection will be reported in advance so subscribers have time to investigate purchase options from the publishers or from other aggregators (J. Guinup, personal communication, May 2, 2025).
The platform doesn’t feature “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” as its own topic, but relevant content is easy to find. For example, a topic page for Environmental Racism leads to relevant scholarly articles, magazine pieces, case studies, and so on. Similarly, the Sustainable Development Goals include an entry for Gender Equality and another for Reduced Inequalities, and users can find articles related to the specific targets enumerated within each of those goals.
The ProQuest One series was one of the first ProQuest products to include the Research Assistant feature that is now being added to multiple ProQuest interfaces, including, most recently, Ebook Central. Clarivate does not specify how this tool is “AI-powered,” but online demonstrations indicate that it draws only on internal content and is not linked to public AI agents (NCLive, 2025).
During a search, the Research Assistant suggests terms that may reveal related research avenues; users can select these terms to add them to the query (ProQuest, 2025a). Once a user has a document open, the Research Assistant offers much more information, summarizing key takeaways and generating key concepts for quick skimming and linking to suggested sources (Ennis, 2024; Keiser, 2024). As of this writing, the Research Assistant feature can be turned on or off for ebooks via LibCentral; for databases, subscribers can opt out by contacting ProQuest support.
The ProQuest One homepage is organized into three sections. A header block incorporates main navigation and search. The next row presents access points and browsing options related to Scholarly Journals, Featured Topics, and Sustainability Pillars (Figure 2).
Scrolling further, the user will encounter trending topics and a mix of featured resources and curated collections of material in the categories “Sustainable Development Goals,” “Sustainability Competencies,” and “Featured Books.”
Although the search bar is at the top of the page, the strong visuals drew my eye to the more curated content: I began my exploration of the platform by selecting some of the featured topics and navigating through the linked resources. I then returned to the home page and moved down to investigate the scrollable carousels dedicated to sustainability goals and sustainability competencies. Each time I selected a topic-based item, I found introductory material offering a digestible explanation (with a source citation) and then tiles guiding me to more granular research in that subject.
These other access points have a particular draw, but standard searching also works well.
To generate realistic searches, I used a list of keywords I had developed based on recent capstones produced by Environmental Studies students at my institution. When I searched one of these terms, scarcity, the first result was a full topic page on Crop Yield and Quality Under Water Scarcity. In Figure 3, you can see an example of that topic’s explanation as well as the headings for the tiles that make up the rest of the page.
A subsequent search for urban tree canopy turned up a set of results in the thousands, which could be filtered in various ways. By comparison, the result set for “urban tree canopy” in quotation marks was much smaller and more tailored. No surprises there. (Search tips describing the use of operators and how variant terms are handled can be accessed at any time from a link within the main search box.)
The results of the latter search included a video from Academic Video Online (AVON), so I investigated whether users accessing multimedia content through ProQuest One have full access to any unique features from the material’s source platform. In this case, I was able to use AVON’s searchable and translatable transcript.
To the right of the search results, in a sidebar titled Books that match your search, two full-text ebooks appeared; opening them revealed the standard Ebook Central interface.
When an article is open, the AI Research Assistant sits to the right of the article text in a collapsible sidebar. By default, that sidebar is open and has its own scroll bar. (If you use a mouse wheel to scroll, placement of your mouse determines which of the three scroll bar controls nested inside the frame you are controlling—this can be a bit clunky.) It is structured as a vertical series of boxes.
The top element of the Research Assistant is usually a key takeaways box presenting a quick summary. In the next box down, the user may be referred to related topic pages. For example, next to a meta-analysis of traffic related air pollution, related research topics included respiratory illness linked to air pollution; cardiovascular illness and air pollution; and children’s vulnerability to air pollution. The final box is dedicated to suggested resources and a list of applied indexing terms with checkboxes, which can be used to generate new searches (Figure 4). At the bottom of the sidebar are floating buttons labeled “Brainstorm related research topics,” which will launch a new search in a new tab, and “Describe the important concepts.”
Each article can be viewed as full text HTML or as a PDF. The PDF is laid out as originally published and is downloadable. Note that if the user downloads the document using the controls within the frame of the PDF viewer, the file is automatically named “out,” rather than using metadata to generate a unique or human-friendly title, although users do have the option to rename the file before saving.
The Abstract/Details tab shows the article’s metadata, including any assigned key topic, sustainability pillar, subject, or business indexing term; companies/organizations; ProQuest internal document identifier; copyright information; and date of last update, in addition to standard metadata like author(s), DOI, and subject headings.
During a long session users may be prompted to create a My Research account. Such an account is not required, but having one makes it possible to save searches and results between sessions.
The ProQuest One interface is covered by the VPAT for ProQuest Academic, which indicates that it has been assessed up to Level AA under WCAG 2.2 as of as of February 2025. The current conformance report and narrative accessibility statement are downloadable from ProQuest’s accessibility directory.
The Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) hasn’t tested the ProQuest One interface, but it has tested two of the other platforms that are linked within the resource: Alexander Street and Ebook Central. The LAA resource page for each platform provides links to the most recent review along with point-by-point vendor responses to conditions found in that or prior reviews (both types of files are helpfully dated by year).
I attempted to explore ProQuest One Sustainability using keyboard navigation and the Windows Narrator and NVDA screen readers. As a nonexpert user of these tools, I found it difficult to navigate to and operate all the features that were available to me as a sighted user. A ProQuest product manager recommended screen reader quick reference guides from Deque Systems, which were very helpful, but I never became proficient enough to navigate this complex interface smoothly. I also assessed the site with the Web Accessibility Evaluation (WAVE) browser extension, which flagged some issues in meeting Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) standards.
It would be helpful to the library community for more skilled reviewers to assess accessibility for this interface.
ProQuest One Sustainability is subject to ProQuest’s standard terms of use (Clarivate, 2022). In these terms, the definition of authorized users is determined by the type of library. For academic libraries, common uses, such as interlibrary loan and the inclusion of durable links in online course packs or e-reserve systems, are allowed. For all types of libraries, text- and data-mining (TDM) are prohibited, as is use of the product to create new tools, algorithms, or models. Be aware that additional specific provisions may be included in your product order form.
COUNTER 5.1 statistics and SUSHI harvesting are available.
Pricing is determined by the size of the institution and the number of prospective users (full time equivalent). If the ProQuest One Sustainability content includes any of the library’s existing holdings, the cost will be adjusted, and special pricing is available for consortia.
Since they are part of the existing ProQuest platform, all ProQuest One resources have an established and robust list of authentication methods, including IP address recognition, proxy, single sign-on (SSO), and manual account creation. Refer to the support page Log In to ProQuest for official documentation.
A review of academic library A–Z lists across the country shows significant competitor products from EBSCO (e.g., Sustainability Reference Center; Environment Complete) and Gale (e.g., Gale OneFile: Environmental Studies and Policy; Gale in Context: Environmental Studies), and more limited representation for other publishers such as Hein, Oxford, Sage, and Wiley. ProQuest has offered several related resources over the years, which are popular in their own right. A few resources appear from societies and nonprofit organizations, such as CAB International (CABI) and the Society of American Foresters.
It is noteworthy that many educational institutions include publications from federal agencies in their catalogs and A–Z lists. Historically, these resources have had the double advantage of being free to use and reliable. Many of the sites and datasets related to environmental studies may now be offline due to staff and budget cuts or facing ideological review (to purge content related to climate change, for example).
It would be valuable to hear from vendors and publishers about how these issues are affecting their existing products or product development, as well as whether any material they host could stand in for missing government publications in areas related to topics like climate change and environmental justice.
Earlier this year, Clarivate announced that it would shift its focus to subscription resources. It has subsequently presented two new marquee offerings, ProQuest Central Premium and ProQuest Digital Collections, that will realign and combine numerous subsidiary products, including several from the ProQuest One series. For example, ProQuest Digital Collections includes ProQuest One Literature as a component (ProQuest, 2025b).
Other components might gain the ProQuest One name but not necessarily adopt the interface described in this review. For example, the Anthology Resource Library is now branded as ProQuest One Anthropology even though it remains on the Alexander Street platform.
The benefits of divorcing the moniker from the interface are not clear to me, as the interface has many positive qualities. A strength of the ProQuest One approach is that it supports both newer students of the subject and more experienced researchers. Current students in particular are likely to appreciate the interface’s strong visuals and the incorporation of many different sources and formats.
For librarians and library administration, the product may offer an opportunity to gain full-text access to desirable journals, such as relevant Nature titles and other highly ranked serials, where direct subscriptions or dedicated packages may be too expensive.
There are, however, a few nits to pick. The quality of historical material varies and is sometimes downright poor. For example, the search term soil erosion turned up results under the source type Historical Newspapers—something that would be appealing to researchers wanting to track historical coverage in a particular time period or compare coverage over time—but while one story from 1908 was perfectly legible, another from 1935 was basically unreadable due to poor scan quality. This is not a fault of ProQuest One Sustainability, but it shows that problems inherent to the original material have not been resolved prior to incorporation here.
It is also not immediately clear how many of these publications might be openly available outside the product. For example, a scan of the publisher list shows that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is included and is listed for 172 publications. All OECD Publications are now published open access and every OECD item I spot checked showed up on the OECD site.
In the case of freely available content like this, the advantage lies in the indexing and organization rather than the access—and, possibly, pre-existing user familiarity with or preference for the ProQuest platform in comparison to the OECD website.
ProQuest One Sustainability would be a useful resource for academic institutions with degree programs or significant coursework in sustainability or any library where patron interest in environmental topics is high. It successfully functions as a “one stop shop” to orient users to the subject area and connect them with relevant content at all levels of complexity.
Clarivate. (2022, December). Product/Service Terms. https://clarivate.com/legal-center/terms-of-business/product-service-terms/
Clarivate. (2024, November 7). Clarivate launches new sustainability research solution [press release]. https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-launches-new-sustainability-research-solution/
Ennis, M. (2024, August 5). AI on the horizon. Library Journal, 149(8), 38. https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/ai-on-the-horizon
Keiser, B. (2024, October). Clarivate AI research assistants. Computers in Libraries, 44(8), 42-44.
NC LIVE. (2025, March 6). Unlocking the power of ProQuest Research Assistant in ProQuest Central [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/CfgUVWlgt4w?si=FsK2zA1q1Sx3S8MY
ProQuest. (2019a, January 23). ProQuest launches ProQuest One™ Academic [press release]. https://about.proquest.com/en/news/2019/ProQuest-Launches-ProQuest-One-Academic/
ProQuest. (2019b, November 20). ProQuest One Academic voted ‘best interface’ by Charleston Advisor readers [press release]. https://about.proquest.com/en/blog/2019/ProQuest-One-Academic-Voted-Best-Interface-by-Charleston-Advisor-Readers
ProQuest. (2025a, February 6). Introducing ProQuest Research Assistant [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/78MPNBo3lkc?si=YEd0PcMNu4JKq7tn
ProQuest. (2025b, February 18). Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access [press release]. https://about.proquest.com/en/blog/2025/introducing-proquest-digital-collections-a-new-library-subscription-offering-unparalleled-breadth-value-and-access/
10.1146/katina-070125-1
