The main search box on the MSK Library website searches our web-scale discovery tool known as Summon. Summon pulls from many different resources and content types such as book chapters, whole books/eBooks, journal articles, databases, PMIDs, DOIs, and newspapers, along with other digital collections that we subscribe to. Take a look at the Venn diagram below for a visual representation of what Summon contains and check out our What am I Searching? page for more detailed information and screen shots on how Summon works.

Ask us if you have any specific questions or would like assistance with leveraging Summon for your research – we are happy to help!

Proximity searching is a technique for searching a keyword within a certain number of words from another keyword. Searching in this manner can help to limit the total number of results you receive while delivering a more focused list of results relevant to your topic in a database. Finding keywords within close proximity to one another is a simple and useful way to employ some advanced searching techniques into your research workflow. Try proximity searching from the main search box on the library website (Summon) using this example: “radiotherapy carcinoma” ~3.

The ~3 tells Summon to find the words radiotherapy and carcinoma within 3 words from one another. The double quotes surrounding both words are necessary so Summon knows which keywords to search on. For questions about proximity searching in Summon (or other databases), please ask us!

Did you know that when you use the main search box on the Library website you are using the Summon search and discovery tool? Summon can be thought of as a comprehensive, very large web-scale database and source of literature. Instead of having a niche focus like PubMed for biomedical information, Embase for pharmaceutical/drug information, PsycINFO for behavioral sciences, CINAHL for nursing and allied health literature, or AMED for complementary and alternative medicine information, Summon indexes sources from all of these resources and beyond – capturing not only what’s in the MSK Library collection, but searches can also be expanded to include results that exist outside of MSK. Follow these steps to run a basic search and view the difference between MSK-subscribed content vs. going beyond MSK’s collection.

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