Library Guides: HIP101 Research Skills Guide: Topic searching in Primo Search

Searching on a topic in Primo Search

As well as using Primo Search to find known items, you can also use it to find information on a topic.

For example, for the topic cardiac disease in Australia, our search in Primo Search could be:
"cardiac disease" australia*

Note #1	In Primo Search, our two terms are combined with AND. So our search is effectively: "cardiac disease" [AND] australia*
Note #2	The double quotation marks force the enclosed words to be searched for as a phrase.
Note #3	The asterisk forces a search of all terms that start with australia- (that is, australia, australian, australia's etc).

Primo Search searches across nearly all the Library's resources so you usually get lots of results, and of all kinds.

The idea is to use the Refiners to show only results by certain criteria.

You can refine by criteria such as Resource type, Date, and Topic.

If you are getting too many results, and they don't seem relevant, try going to Advanced Search. You can then:

Change from searching in Any field to Title. This will search for your terms only in the title of each record, and you should get results that are more relevant ... OR ...
Change Any field to Subject. This will search for your terms only in the Subject Headings of each record, an you should get results that are more relevant. See also Field Searching, in Search Techniques.

If you are STILL not satisfied with the results, try searching directly in a relevant database. See Databases.

For more help with Primo Search, see the Library's