Library:Finding Reviews and Criticism/Search Summon
Search Summon
What is Summon?
Summon is a search engine that provides a single starting point to find and access the majority of the UBC Library collections - including books, ebooks, scholarly journals and articles, newspaper articles, dissertations and theses, videos, maps, manuscripts, music scores, digitized items, and more. It is a hosted service from Serials Solutions, with the Summon knowledge base and UBC Library content combined into one unified index.
To use Summon to find criticism, interpretation, or analysis, follow these tips:
Tip 1 - Search the Author's Name and/or Title of the Work
To search for material about your author/director and their work, perform a search in Summon, the "General" tab on the library homepage. If you are looking for information about a specific work, search using the title. If you do not find anything on a particular literary work, try searching for the author/director's name. Remember that books about an author will contain information about there work.
Remember: If you are searching for a title, use quotation marks to search for the entire phrase.
Tip 2 - Use Limits to Narrow to Criticism/Interpretation
Once you have performed the search in Summon, look at the left side of results page to find the variety of ways you can narrow your search. Under the menu marked Subject Terms, select the terms related to criticism, interpretation, and analysis.
Select the "more" link for a list of all subject terms.
Select the terms related to criticism and interpretation.
Some examples of subject terms that may be useful are:
- criticism and interpretation
- history and criticism
- literary criticism
If there are no subject terms related to criticism or interpretation, perform a search using these terms to try and narrow down your results. For example:
- maus (criticism OR interpretation)
Tip 3 - Read the Abstract or Record
Before selecting the full article to include in your research, do some pre-reading. Hover your mouse over the title of an article to read an abstract of the article. This will give you important information about the author's focus. For books and other media, select the title link and look at the record's subjects, summary, and contents for useful information about the title.