May 4, 2012 – The addition of Summon to our searchable resources last summer significantly changed how library patrons find resources. It effectively incorporates the functions of the other three search tabs on the home page (Addison, Databases, and Journals). Here are the top 20 searches for the 2011-2012 academic year:

1. pubmed
2. web of science
3. jstor
4. consumer reports
5. academic search complete
6. ieee
7. hunger games
8. nutrition care manual
9. plant competition
10. psycinfo
11. factiva
12. the hunger games
13. catching fire
14. IEEE Xplore
15. scholar
16. ebscohost
17. lexis nexis
18. gordon roskop j chem phys b
19. scifinder
20. safari

Almost all of these top searches are database names (numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, and 20). While all of our databases are represented in Summon, searching database titles like this will result in multiple clicks before you can access the database. It's much more efficient to do these kinds of searches in the Databases tab on the home page, where you'll be just one click away from the database you need.

Consumer Reports was used by several classes for assignments this year. Summon will show both our print subscription and online access to this magazine; be sure to note the format icon next to each result so you'll access the version you prefer.

Several searches in the top 100 referenced the popular Hunger Games books. Since Summon will return both books from our catalog and articles about those books, be sure to use the Content Type facet on the left of the results to narrow to your choice of formats.

We think the scholar searches are looking for the course management system used here at Tech. While Summon includes a lot of content, it's not a web page search engine.

Item number 18 is part of an article citation, and while it does return a few articles from the Journal of Chemical Physics B, searching either the article title or the unabbreviated journal title will give better results. Using the advanced features of a database like Web of Science may also lead to the desired results much more efficiently.