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Summon Help

Refine Your Search

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Because Summon lets you search all formats at once, you need a way to quickly narrow the results to those that are most useful to you.

Use the filters on the left to limit to:

  • Items available in full-text online
  • Scholarly & Peer Reviewed articles
  • Items in CONSORT
  • Specific formats like books, journal articles, or video
  • Items published within a specific date range

Searching by Author, Title, ISBN

If you are looking for a specific author, title, etc. it is possible to customize your search. 

You can explicitly search a field by entering field:(search terms) into the search box. 

For example you can search: title:(Art of Creative Teaching)

And the results will show resources that contain those words (highlighted in bold) in the title: 

summon search title results
 

Use quotation marks with this strategy to find records with exact phrases.

The search title:("Art of Creative Teaching") finds records with that exact phrase in the title field.

You can use this construction to search the following fields:

  • Author
  • Title
  • ISBN/ISSN
  • Subject Terms
  • Publisher
  • Publication Title
  • Language
  • DOI
  • and more...

Phrase Searching

Like Google, if you want the words you search to show up together use quotation marks around search terms.

The search "teacher education" will find results with that exact phrase.

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Boolean Searching - AND, OR, NOT

Summon allows searching with the following Boolean operations: OR, NOT and AND.

The operators must be written in ALL CAPS.

By default, all terms in a search are combined with the AND operator.

To expand the results set, use the OR operator to return items that contain either term.

  • EX: microcircuits OR nanocircuits 
  • This can be combined with quoted terms: "teacher education" OR "educator training".

To exclude items in Summon, use the NOT operator or the minus sign (-) before a term. The search animal NOT dog will not include results with the term dog.

Wildcard Use in Summon

Searches within Summon can be performed using the wildcards ? and *.

The question mark (?) will match any one character. For example, to find Olsen or Olson, search: Ols?n.

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. For example:

  • A search for ch*ter would match charter, character, and chapter.
  • A search for temp*, it will match all suffixes, for example, temptation, temple and temporary.

Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.