The Faculty of Medicine seal. Link to startpage

Brief guide for information searching

Finding scholarly articles
Finding databases and journals within your subject area in Summon
Suggestions for good keywords for your literature search
Books
Theses and essays
Dictionaries and reference works

Finding scholarly articles in Summon
When you search for articles in Summon, you are searching in journals that Lund University subscribes to. Most of the articles you find in Summon can be read, printed out and downloaded to your computer.

Open Summon and search in the plain search box, or use advanced search (if you are at home, use your student account to log in)
Search using one or two words. NB: use English terms. If the results are numerous try using just words in the title. Change the search menu option from “All Fields” to “Title”.
You can limit your search by date of publication

Searching for articles in databases
If you are looking for information within a specific subject area, a good idea is to start with a query in a subject database. You can find databases within your subject area in Summon by the A-Z list of databases, use Browse by subject.

Most databases are so-called bibliographic databases (also known as reference databases), with citations only providing information on the author and title, plus in most cases a brief summary of the article (abstract). An example of a bibliographic database is PubMed

Remember to…
prepare thoroughly and have a clear idea of what you are looking for before you start searching in a database!

Identify various relevant search terms (synonyms, variant spellings, etc.)
Decide what you want to include and what is not relevant to your question (age group, sex, year of publication, etc.)
Read the help pages to find suggestions on how to search in the specific database you are using.

Finding databases and journals within your subject area in Summon
You can find databases within a specific subject area in Summon. Go to the A-Z list of databases and use Browse by subject. There are different types of databases in Summon, among them image databases with graphics, illustrations, photographs and tables. SpringerImages is an excellent image database!

Remember that…
there could be relevant databases and journals under the subject heading Health & Biological sciences.

Quick search!
You can also perform a quick search using one or more terms to find journals and databases as well as articles. Quick search can be found on Summon's front page.

Summon

MeSH – find the right keywords for your database search
MeSH provides a search function to find the right keywords for your literature search. Karolinska Institutet University Library maintains a database with medical terms in English (MeSH terms) and their Swedish translations. In other words, you can search for a Swedish term and find the equivalent English MeSH term used to describe articles in PubMed/Medline.

Finding books and dissertations

Printed literature

Start by searching in Lovisa, Lund University’s library catalogue. You can access Lovisa via the Internet. In Lovisa you can also reserve books and renew loans.
To search for books at other university libraries, such as Malmö University library or the hospital library in Lund, you can use the national library catalogue known as LIBRIS.
If Lund University does not carry the book you are looking for you can order it through us via interlibrary loan. See “Library services/interlibrary loan” in the menu on the left.
Doctoral dissertations can be found in LIBRIS – click on “Material type/s”, select “Theses” and then search by subject. You can also search Lund University Publications for publications from LU authors.

E-books
An increasing number of books and reference works are being published in electronic form. There are several advantages to using electronic reference works and dictionaries: