ProQuest Summon - Indexing 3 Billion Items
Jinfo Blog

By Catherine Dhanjal

Abstract

We recently undertook an in-depth review of the ProQuest Summon discovery service where a single index holds pre-harvested data on 3 billion items.

Item

The benefits of discovery services seem clear - they give end users the opportunity to search thousands or even millions of items through one search, from one platform... and can potentially surface those resources the information centre has invested in but which users don't access as much as they should.

We've been taking a close look at discovery services as part of Jinfo's current Research Focus "Source Expertise - What It Means in a Google World", where we're tackling the question of how information professionals can elevate interest in high quality, specialist sources.

One of the "big four" commercial discovery services is Summon, from ProQuest. We asked reviewer Scott Vine to take an in-depth look at this index-based discovery service and our Product Review of ProQuest Summon is now available.

Billions of Items, Hundreds of Languages 

Summon indexes over 3 billion items, with content in 440 languages.

As Scott explains, "The Summon Service matches and merges data from its multiple sources - such as full text, abstracts, and subject terms; normalising, correcting and deduplicating this metadata, to deliver a single unified record. In practice, for example, this can mean merging abstracts and subject terms from ProQuest and Gale; full text from Wiley, Sage and Elsevier, peer-reviewed data from Ulrich's; citation counts, controlled vocabularies, and subject terms from Scopus; and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) from CrossRef."

Speedy Searches

What makes it different from a federated search solution is that it provides fast and accurate results based on pre-harvested data which is stored in a single index. 

Scott was able to put the service to the test himself through a demo version and to try out live implementations being used in the UK and North America, by the likes of Teeside University and Toronto University. He notes that to better surface resources you've invested in, "you can choose to set the default just to search content that you as an organisation/institution have access to or licences for". 

Find Out More

To read the full in-depth analysis, including information on development plans, competitors, administration & analytics, read Jinfo's Product Review of ProQuest Summon.

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