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English 499: Library Summon Search

Intro

Using Summon - the library's search engine

From the MU Libraries homepage, you will see several SEARCH options. The first one is labeled Summon. This search box allows you to find results in print or online, and these results can be scholarly, peer-reviewed, or popular. Below are some tips for using Summon. 

 

Tips for researching literary theories

Once on the Summon results page, choose language and literature from the Discipline option. 

To further pinpoint your results, select any relevant Subject terms from the Subjects option. 

Summon Advanced

Summon's Advanced Search page provides many of the same refining options as the simple search page, with the addition of using multiple search boxes to narrow your parameters. View the helpful tips below for more information.

Go to Summon Advanced

Using Summon Search Options

Search for the Right Type of Source

The Summon Advanced Search on the library homepage allows you to select from many different options to narrow / refine your search results. 

Summon Advanced by MU Libraries

A few more helpful tips...

  • Sometimes, we have search terms that are hard for a database to understand. For example: social media is a term, social is another term, and media is yet another term. But, they all mean very different things. So, when you need to keep a multiple-word search together, you may want to include quotation marks to keep the database from separating your words: "social media" versus social media. 
  • Some databases will provide links to similar sources. Look for something that says Find Similar Results, or You May Also Like to discover additional relevant sources. Often, these options are on the sides of the page, or near the top or bottom. 
  • When you find an article that is exactly what you were hoping to find, check out the References, Bibliography or Endnotes page (at the end), or Footnotes (at the bottom of each page). This information will tell you what that author used in their research, and may point you toward resources you otherwise might never have found.