Question:
How do I search Summon for legal resources?
Our answer:
What is Summon?
Like Google? …… You’ll love Summon.
“It's fast, it’s simple, and it's available from the Online Library”
Do you like the simplicity of searching the internet for journal articles, but are unsure of the quality and reliability of your results? If so, then Summon is for you! Summon is the Online Library search engine that allows you to search your Online Library databases for scholarly journal articles and eBooks with the ease of a “Google like” single search box. Summon searches across your Online Library databases, then links to the full text of journal articles, eBooks, newspapers and more.
Summon and searching the Legal Databases
At present Summon will not directly retrieve the full-text of journal articles in Lexis+ and Westlaw. Summon will locate the journal article, and ask you to log into the relevant database (see the How do I login? FAQ), where you can then search by author and title to retrieve the full text. Searching the legal databases directly will help you when undertaking your research.
Summon is a good starting point for your research. Summon will help you locate available journal and newspaper articles, and eBooks. However, it does not search for all the legal journal titles available, and it does not search for cases and legislation. If you do not find what you are looking for in Summon you can search the databases directly from your Study Programme gateway.
To find cases and legislation search vLex Justis.
Westlaw also contains the legal journals index which is not searched by Summon. The Legal Journals Index contains the abstracts of journal articles but not the full text. However the full-text of the articles are often available in other Online Library databases. Searching the legal journals index helps you to widen the scope of your research especially when looking for articles on a particular topic. You can search the Westlaw journals database as well as searching Summon to discover journal articles. To find out if a journal (or law report) is available from the Online Library databases search the A-Z Journals List.
Try Summon for yourself now, or read more information about Summon.