How to Use Summon

Summon uses a variety of facets to limit and refine search results, much like Amazon and database providers like ESBCOhost. Results can be refined by date, subject, publication type and other options.  Each time you turn a facet on or off, your search is repeated and you'll see a new set of results.  Select as many options as you wish, but allow the screen to refresh between each one.  Most facets will reduce the number of search results (Include results from outside your library's collection will always increase the number of results.) Use the more link beneath a set of facets to see additional choices (these are typically listed in order of the number of results) and to use an exclude facet option in addition to the default include option.

Popular choices for limiting your results are to select documents that are available with full text online, from scholarly publications or not in newspapers.

You can also refine your results by content type, such as, journal article, book, eBook, newspaper article, etc… To refine your results by date range, use the slider(s) to change the Publication Date range.

If you refine your search by adding results beyond Randall Library’s collection, you will find references for items not immediately available, but frequently these items may be obtained via interlibrary loan.

When you turn on the Limit to articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review option, you will limit your search results to articles from peer-reviewed journals. (Note that books from academic and university publishers are often considered "scholarly," but this option eliminates all books from your results.) This option uses data from UlrichsWeb - Ulrich's Periodical Directory , which identifies scholarly and peer-reviewed journals, and is our preferred source of this information when you need to manually verify a journal or article citation as being scholarly.