From time to time I look to see what is being searched in Summon. And I’m always delighted and surprised at the breadth of topics being researched here at UST. So yesterday someone (or several people) were looking for time travel in philosophy. Hmm, interesting. I’m going to use this example to show you a shortcut in Summon for searching within a topic. Summon retrieved a number of interesting and useful results when time travel in philosophy was searched. Most were totally relevant, some were misses (i.e. a review for the film Primer with the title “Time travel, philosophy and geek chic” which describes the film).
Here’s are a few tips to move you along in Summon a little faster. When searching a topic within a discipline (in this case the topic is time travel and the discipline is philosophy), just search the topic and then limit by the discipline:
Limiting by discipline helps narrow your results. This also works well with another search I saw, transformational learning in social work. Search transformational learning and then limit to discipline social work.
And always, if you’re looking for academic articles, limit to Scholarly Research or Peer-Review. My favorite limiter has to be Reference. Using Reference as a limiter for content type finds your topic in encyclopedias and dictionaries. We have thousands of online reference materials and sometimes they end up writing your whole paper for you. Now when I say encyclopedias, I don’t mean a 2 paragraph article reminiscent of the World Book. I’m talking about a 4 page article on the Causal Approaches to the Direction of Time in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, complete with an extensive bibliography. Or the Companion to the Philosophy of Time, which starts out, “The philosophy of time has been a central area of concern for philosophers for thousands of years. It remains one of the most active areas of academic philosophy, but the study of time has never been more dynamic and interdisciplinary than now.” I imagine this book could get you pretty far in your paper.
