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Hello and welcome to this Level Up virtual session.
This is a deep dive into Summon, our main library search tool, and it's being presented by Roman
Koshykar. I'm the engineering librarian here at the RIT Libraries. Summon is a search tool that
works a lot like a search engine, but it has many features which allow you to really drill down into
your results and work with that result set to get the most out of your library research and
make the process more efficient and more useful. As you go about exploring the different resources
that we have in our library, you'll find Summon search boxes in places like the library website
search all books articles and media -
and you'll find it embedded in many different InfoGuides as well.
Just for example, I'll show you the biomedical engineering guide - start your research with
Summon - and this search box will also search the Summon tool. So because this works kind of
like a search engine, really all you have to do is search for a topic of interest
and immediately you'll start to find results on whatever topic you searched for.
Now, I'm recording this session off campus, and this is actually a good demonstration.
Notice up here at the top right it says if you're off campus you can log in to access the full text
and more content. This is very important to do, as you can then be authenticated by proxy
to access the many different
resources that the library subscribes to, such as e-books and journal articles.
So if you do see that option, it's highly advisable that you go ahead and log in to
authenticate by proxy. So the basics of Summon here are there's a left panel, center panel,
and right panel, and on the right panel we use this space to make important announcements about
the library and our services. And you can also chat with us and chat with a librarian anytime
you have trouble with something while you're using Summon. This will instantly connect you
to the librarian on duty who can work with you to help solve your problem.
The center pane is your search results themselves, and we'll spend a lot of time looking at those.
But more importantly, along the left hand side are all of these search refinements, which is
what helps you drill down into the various results that you have and pick out the ones that will be
most useful for your research project. Notice also that there is a help link up here, which
allows you to access what we would call search tips in the library, and how to use different
things. And I will demonstrate a few of these. Summon allows for phrase searching. Summon allows
for Boolean operators. There are searchable fields in the advanced search, wild card, and other kinds
of search - advanced search techniques can be learned about here, so this is all of the basic
little tweaks and tricks that Summon supports. And again, I can show you how some of those work at
a pretty basic level, but there's more available than I'll be able to demonstrate in this session.
So I searched for electric vehicles and found 6.8 million results - far too many to read
through. And one of those search tips - I can use quotation marks, which will find the exact phrase
electric vehicles, rather than electric vehicles, electric and vehicles in a different sentence,
and so on. So right away, this narrows down the search and also makes it a lot more relevant,
because I really do want to research electric vehicles. And now I have 1.4 million results,
still quite a lot. I can use the Boolean operator AND, and quotes again -
electric vehicles and charging stations - so the results must have both of those phrases present.
And this narrows down the results significantly - 159,000 as opposed to millions. So just by
creating a little bit more of a structured search, I'm able to drill down into this topic and also
research two specific topics, and how they're related - electric vehicles and charging stations.
Now I can use the refinements on the left to really get at what I'm interested in.
So I can select all scholarly and peer-reviewed sources by checking
that box, and now I'm down to 9200 results.
I could, if I wanted to, filter by content type, but I'm going to skip that for now. Now imagine
that you were researching electric vehicles and charging stations for a public policy course.
You would want to focus in the discipline of economics rather than engineering, because that's
closer to public policy than technology. So I can say show me results from the economics discipline,
and I have about 1500 results now. Really getting into this topic. I could,
if I wanted to, limit by subject terms. I could also exclude things
that I don't want. Same thing with the database sources, because the RIT Libraries subscribes
to all these databases, which are the sources of the records that we're getting from Summon.
But again, I'm going to forego that. I could also limit by language, although I don't know that that
would be very relevant or useful in this case. But the final result limit that I want to show
you is publication date, and I'm interested in current research about electric vehicles
and charging stations. So I'm going to say show me articles published within the last one year.
And now I have 427 results. That's still probably more than I would read for a
research paper assignment, but it gives me a much clearer picture of what I can study and research
about electric vehicles and charging stations from the economics field in the current year.
So very quickly I've been able to get through these results and get a pretty good set to work
for my research. Now I want to take a look at the middle panel here, and look at the results
themselves. There are indicator icons of various kinds. There's one that indicates that yes,
full text online is in fact available, and I can follow that - it's linkable - I can
follow that over to read the paper itself, and because again I'm logged in by proxy,
I would be able to access the subscribed full text of that article. In some cases, articles
may be open access also, so that indicator is available here. And because I selected scholarly
and peer-reviewed, I would expect to see this peer-reviewed icon show up in all my results.
You can also look at the Cites and Cited By. Cites
are the references cited by those authors. The terminology gets a little bit muddy, so it's
good to kind of take a look at this. So Cites are for that particular article that I found,
the researchers cited these articles. Cited By means someone has cited that paper
in a different paper, so the By is the key part there. So notice that there's a lot fewer. This
is a recent article, so even just within a year or less, two other articles have cited
my original source. So Cites and Cited By do not show up for every result, but when they do,
they're very powerful ways of getting at more literature about a particular topic and expanding
beyond this more manageable list into maybe, perhaps a more thorough review of the literature.
Now you can also save items by clicking the little bookmark shaped icon, and just for demonstration
purposes, I'm going to save the first five items. Now if you were actually researching
for a research paper, you would want to select out the ones that were most meaningful to you,
and one of the best ways to discover what's the most meaningful is to use this quick look
indicator, which opens up the abstract. So that's their terminology - quick look - but really what
it's doing is showing you the abstract and also the subjects that this particular article could be
about. So I could read the abstract and determine is this something that I really would be able to
draw on for my own writing. So up here again, towards the top right, are my five saved items,
and there is a note here indicating that this is a temporary folder. So what I want to do now
is take those saved items and get them into a place where I can draw on them in the future.
So I can print this if I'm connected to a printer. I could email it to myself, but I can also export
to a variety of things. So I'm going to export this to Zotero, but before I do that, I want to
show you that you can also generate a bibliography.
So I'm going to
automatically generate a bibliography. If I'm not a Zotero user, this could stand in
for creating that formatted bibliography, in this case according to the APA 7th edition
rules. And then I could copy and paste this into Word document or Google doc,
but then I might have to manually change the formatting so that it it
looks the way that I really want it to look in my research paper.
But I can also export the entire
collection to Zotero
and here's Zotero
and I'm going to
import this file
my downloads
okay there it is
then I could then change the name of this collection to
EVs and charging stations. And then use Zotero to create a bibliography from the
collection according to, again, APA seventh edition. I'm going to copy it to my clipboard
and have my finished bibliography there. Now again,
if I wanted to just kind of compare what happens
if I use the built-in tool in Summon
then I could also copy and paste this directly, which is great, but then again I would have to
kind of go through and maybe modify the formatting a little bit so it looks more like this. So either
solution works well it saves you time in the end as you have kind of a working bibliography of all
of the results that you've saved that way. So, a little bonus content about using Zotero there,
but the point of this session is really to look at the Summon search tool itself,
and you can bypass saving things to the folder. If you want to just cite the individual item,
generate a permanent link, or email a single item to yourself to investigate later.
So, with that in mind, you are well prepared to get the most out of our RIT Libraries Summon
search tool, and please contact us by chatting with a librarian or sending us an email,
and we can further assist you in all of your research projects. Thank you for watching!
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