Struggling to find academic material for your assignment, research proposal, or thesis?The Library can help with a literature search—a systematic and comprehensive search for published academic resources on your topic.
How to request a literature search:
Complete our online form or use the Unisa Student App (available on the Android Play Store and iStore). In the app, go to Library and select Literature Search Form.
Like a search engine, Summon Discovery allows you to search seamlessly across Unisa's library's resources including the library catalog, e-resources, Institutional Repository, archival materials and lots more!
Phrase, field, Boolean, wildcard and proximity searches can all be used in the Summon service.
Type of Search |
How do I use it? |
Example |
Link to more information |
| Phrase searches limit results to exact phrase matches. | Entering multiple terms in double quotes (" ") limits results to exact phrase matches. | "computational linguistics" | Start Here - How to search - LibGuides at University of South Africa (UNISA) |
| Field searches limit results to matches in the specified fields. |
Field searches, or fielded searches, specify which field to search. The field search options are available in the Advance Searching in Summon. To access click on Options within the search box on your search results page. |
Examples:
|
Summon: Phrase, Field, Boolean, Wildcard and Proximity Searching - Ex Libris Knowledge Center |
| Boolean searches, depending on how they are written, can either limit or expand your search. |
The Summon supports the following Boolean operations: AND, OR, and NOT. The operators must be written in all capital letters to ensure that they are interpreted as Boolean operators. Boolean searches can be combined with other search options, such as the phrase search and the field search. |
(Title:cats OR Title:dogs OR Title:"white lions") AND Author:smith, Title:(dogs NOT cats) | Start Here - How to search - LibGuides at University of South Africa (UNISA) |
| Wildcard searches expand your searches based on word stems or spelling variations. |
Searches within the Summon service can be performed using two wildcards: the question mark (?) and the asterisk (*). Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search, nor should a wildcard be used within double quotes (phrase searching). The use of wildcards within a phrase search is not supported. |
A search for Ch*ter will match Charter, Character, and Chapter. A search for Temp* will match Temptation, Temple, and Temporary |
Start Here - How to search - LibGuides at University of South Africa (UNISA) |
| Proximity searches limit results to terms that appear within a specified number of words in a phrase. |
Proximity searches limit result sets to terms within a specified number of words from each other. To perform a proximity search, enclose your search terms in quotation marks and use the tilde (~) followed by a number indicating the distance you want to allow between the search terms. Proximity searching does not take the order of search terms into account. |
"yeast bread"~10 finds material where the words yeast and bread appear within 10 words of each other. | Start Here - How to search - LibGuides at University of South Africa (UNISA) |
By default, Summon sorts search results based on Relevance.
The relevance drop-down list allows you to select the following additional sort options:
Note: this is an advanced search option. Summon's relevance ranking algorithm is designed to work best with basic search options, and 99% of search cases should not need this option. If search results need to be refined or improved, we recommend that you start with more basic search options, such as faceting, phrase searching and field searching.
Summon's relevance ranking algorithm assigns weights to search terms according to the importance of the terms, approximated by a logarithmically scaled inverse of the document frequency (i.e., the number of documents that contain a term) in the entire Central Discovery Index. As a result, infrequent/rare terms are weighted higher than frequent/common terms.
The "^" operator allows the modifications of the relevance weights of search terms, phrases, fielded searches or Boolean expressions. The format is term^multiplier or expression^multiplier. For example, the multiplier of 2 doubles the original weight, and the multiplier of 0.5 halves the original weight.
When the "^" operator is used with a multi-term phrase or expression, the multiplier is applied to all of the terms in the phrase or expression.
Examples:
Please note that the "^" operator cannot be used within double quotes (e.g., "cats^2 dogs"). In such cases, the "^" operator and the multiplier are interpreted literally as part of the term.
Refine your results using the options on the left of the results screen.
For example, to limit your results to the:
The Add results beyond your library's collection feature modifies the search to include the entire Central Discovery Index (with the exception of other institutions' catalog records and Abstracting & Indexing (A&I) content (unless the resource is open access).
Items from the entire Central Discovery Index are returned in search results, including resources to which the library does not subscribe.
Didn't find what you need? Try searching resources separately:
For additional help, don't hesitate to contact the library.