Library Resource Guides: Primo Search Help: SEARCH TIPS

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators can broaden or narrow your results.

Use AND to retrieve results that contain both search terms:

police AND federal

Use OR to retrieve results that contain any or all of your search terms:

politics OR government

Using NOT to exclude irrelevant results:

canine NOT dental

Quotation marks can be used to retrieve more specific results.

Consider searching for a specific phrase:

"global warming"
"state power"
"social media"

Consider searching for a specific spelling of a word:

"colour" instead of "color"
"artefact" instead of "artifact"
"programme" instead of "program"

Parentheses combine keywords and control the order of boolean operators.

Create more complex and focussed search queries:

(tertiary AND university) AND education

(heart OR lung) AND bypass

(Facebook NOT Twitter) AND social media

Truncation and wildcards are used to search for any spelling of a word.

Truncation: use an asterisk (*) to replace part of a word:

librar* = library, libraries, librarian

*plane = airplane, aeroplane, warplane

Wildcards: use a question mark (?) to substitute one letter within a word:

analy?e = analyse, analyze

wom?n = woman, women

Use the field options in Primo Advanced Search to streamline your results.

Fiction items only:

Select the Subject field and search fiction.

Theses & dissertations:

Limit the Material Type to theses. Theses by CSU graduates can be isolated from these results.

Refine by author:

Use the Author field to search for items by a particular author.

If your keywords aren't yielding suitable results, consider different synonyms.

teenager:

tween, adolescent, youth, juvenile

benefit:

advantage, influence, support, asset