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Quick Search

About Quick Search

The large search box on the library's website is the library's discovery tool, called Summon. It works like Google, but your search results come from Summon's "central index" that contains billions of item records for books, articles, book chapters, and all different types of content that might be in a library. Summon gets these item records directly from publishers such as Elsevier, McGraw Hill and Springer. When you search in Summon, you will find content that is also indexed in places like CINAHL and PubMed, but you are not searching those databases directly. It’s a great tool to use when you need to quickly find content on a topic – which is why we call it Quick Search. 

Use Quick Search to discover:

  • articles,
  • print and electronic books,
  • book chapters,
  • conference proceedings,
  • dissertations,
  • journals and more.

Click on the Find Articles, Find Books, or Find Journals tab to limit your results to one of these specific content types.

The Advanced Search link is helpful when you want to refine your search.

For Comprehensive Literature Searches

While Quick Search (Summon) is a great place to do quick searches, for an in-depth literature search it's recommended that you perform your searches directly in databases such as CINAHL or PubMed. When you search directly in these databases, you can perform more sophisticated searches and be assured that you are searching all the content within these resources.

These databases will provide more relevant, precise search results than the library's Quick Search.