Library:Module 4 Locating Article with Summon 4.3

4.3 Locating a Journal Article by Title Using Summon

Sometimes in your research you will come across an article that you would like to locate in the library. If you have the article citation it is simple to use Summon to find the article by title.

Let’s look at our previous journal article citation example:

Slayton, Rebecca. Speaking as Scientists: Computer Professionals in the Star Wars Debate. History & Technology, 2003, Vol. 99:4, p. 335

To search for this specific article in Summon, we need to first identify the article title and the last name of the author:

Slayton, Rebecca. Speaking as Scientists: Computer Professionals in the Star Wars Debate. History & Technology, 2003, Vol. 99:4, p. 335

Sometimes article titles are very similar and it is difficult to find the exact article you are looking for by a specific author. To deal with this problem, search for the author’s last name and the title of the article:

slayton “speaking as scientists”

Searching for the author and title in Summon will likely provide you with the article you are searching for at the top of the results list.

Things to Note We left out the remaining article title after the colon (i.e. Computer Professionals in the Star Wars Debate). Often you will not need to use the full title to find the article. Additionally punctuation marks, such as colons, periods, semicolons, and quotes, confuse Summon when you are searching. Leave punctuation out of your title search. We are not using capital letters. Capital letters are not important in your search. You can either choose to use capitals or not. We are using quotation marks around the title (i.e. “speaking as scientists”). Quotation marks will instruct Summon to search for the words in between the quotations as a phrase. This is important to remember. If you searched without the quotation marks, Summon would search for each word separately. This will give you far too many search results to look through to find your article.