Keyword Searching
Summon™ uses keyword searching and a fairly robust relevancy ranking system to find academic resources of all types relating to a given search.
The relevancy ranking is based up on a "dynamic ranking" scheme that analyzes term frequency, influenced by the fields the terms occur in (i.e., title, author, abstract being weighted more heavily), term proximity, and term stemming.
Search results are presented on the basis of content type (e.g., a book versus reviews of the books), publication date, peer-review (in the case of articles), local collections, and citation counts.
Facets, located on the left menu of the search results page, allow refinement of the search in terms of format (e.g., books, journals, etc.), discipline, publication date, subject terms, and language.
Subject Searching
Subject searching using a controlled vocabulary or pre-defined terms does not exist in Summon™. Instead you can try to do a field search for subject terms. Such a search is less specific than subject searching within a controlled vocabulary but is more specific than a general keyword search.
Phrase Searching
Summon™ allows for phrase searching with the use of " ". For example, the query "rat brain" will find results with that phrase.
Field Searching
The single search box in Summon™ (basic search box or keyword search box in advanced search) will search acorss many fields automatically. However, you can explicity search a field using the syntax: "field: (query)." For example, the search "author(tatsuno), finds records that contain that value in the AUTHOR field. Alternatively, you can use the Advanced Search option to select a specific field within which to perform a specific field.
Searchable fields:
- Title
- Subject Terms
- Author
- Publisher
- Publication Title
- Volume
- Issue
- Language
- Notes
- ISBN
- ISSN
- DOI
- DEWEY
Using Boolean Operators: AND, OR, and NOT
Summon™ offers 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 “microcircuits OR nanocircuits” will return items that contain either term.
This can be combined with quoted terms such as “teacher education” OR “educator training”.
To exclude items in Summon™, use the NOT operator or “-” character before a term. When used in the following query “animal NOT dog” the results will not include the term “dog”.
Truncation and 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.
Limiters
Summon™ uses facets (left hand menu on the search results screen -- see illustration at right) to limit the results returned. As Summon™ indexes all formats of literature (e.g., books, journal articles, videos, etc.), one facet you may want to explore is that for "Content Type" so you can sort journal articles from other formats.
Source: Summon™ Help Screen