Help with Finding Resources

Basic Searching

Enter any information you have into the appropriate fields. You can use any combination of the three fields.

Title and author will give the most specific results (author's surname without initials works best). You do not have to enter the whole title; normally just a few of the important words of the title will do.

If you want to do a general subject search, just use the keywords field.

Phrase Searching

If you are looking for a specific phrase (i.e. words in a specific order), use quotation marks around them, e.g. "clinical nursing"

Advanced Search

The advanced search interface gives you many more options to narrow down your search, for example using ISBN or ISSN numbers. 

Refining Results

Summon searches a huge database of resources, so the list of results can often be long. Use the facets down the left hand side to quickly refine the results.

Basic Facet

Here you can limit the results to items with full text, items from scholarly publications, or physical stock we have in our Learning Centres.

Please be aware that selecting Add results beyond your library's collection will list resources that we may not have access to.

Content type

All the different content types (e.g. books, journals, journal articles etc) are listed here, along with the number of results for each. Just tick the relevant ones to filter the results.

Subject terms

This section allows you to filter by subject terms or tags associated with the results.

Publication date

Move the sliders to select only the results that were published in a given date range. You can also set the date manually using the date boxes below.

Library Location

If you want to know what stock a particular Learning Centre has, just select the sites you are interested in. Selecting any of these locations will exclude all electronic resources from the results.

Language

Use this to narrow down your search to materials in a particular language.

Tips

• Click on more options at the bottom of some facets to see all the options and select multiple options at once
• If you change the search terms but want to keep all the refinements you have set, make sure you tick Keep search refinements

Wildcards

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

The question mark (?) will match any one character and can be used to find “Olsen” or “Olson” by searching for “Ols?n”.

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. A search for “Ch*ter” would match “Charter”, “Character”, and “Chapter”. When used at the end of a word, such as “Temp*”, it will match all suffixes “Temptation”, “Temple” and “Temporary”.

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

Viewing an item

After you have found the item you were searching for, you can preview it by hovering over the main title, or by clicking the magnifying glass icon.

Books and journals should display the availability of the item, and clicking on the title will take you to the catalogue page where you can find more information, and reserve the item if possible (not journals).

For electronic resources, you may be prompted to log in the first time. You should use your IT username and password. If for some reason the article fails to load, try clicking on Get additional resources related to this at the top of the page. This will list all the subscriptions we have to the article.

Saving an item to your list

Clicking the folder icon will save the item to your list (Saved items at the bottom right). From here you can email your list to yourself or print it for future reference. You can also export the list to your reference manager (e.g. RefWorks) but please be aware that the Harvard format differs slightly from the University's format.

The list of saved items is only temporary, and will be lost at the end of your session (e.g. when you close your browser).

What resources does Summon include?

Summon will search through the following resources:

• all print books and journals we hold
• all electronic journals at title level
• the majority of electronic journal articles (about 95% of our holdings currently, but this figure is always increasing)
• all of the theses held in WIRE