Library:Library Research Skills For Biologists/Module 4/Module 4B SearchingForArticles/Page 04

In the last module, we used Summon to find books. Summon is also a great starting place to find journal articles using KEYWORDS for your research question. Let's use keywords to find journal articles about Mars and bacteria.

Here are our results. We use the Refine your search menu on the left of the screen and click on the checkbox next to Limit to articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review.

Searching Summon is fast and easy but has some limitations. Summon works like Google and Google Scholar simply with keywords. Summon contains content from hundreds of the publishers that we purchase from but it doesn't include everything. Note that you may be missing out on some articles relevant to your research if you only use one tool like Summon. It is a full-text search, and so it retrieves documents which include your keywords, but there is no controlled vocabulary structure of subject headings to limit to the most relevant results. For advanced search features, and to do a comprehensive and precise search, you need a article index such as Zoological Record.