In the advanced
search of Metalib+, you can use Subject, Full Text, TOC, and Description to
limit the search to cases in which the terms show up in those fields.
While that sounds like a very powerful way to focus a search, the results can
omit lots of potentially relevant material.
Let’s look at
the case of Primo Central as a ‘Search Scope’ first. The records being
searched in Primo Central come from various publishers. The type and amount of
data that publishers provide varies from publisher to publisher. For
instance, when contributes records to Primo Central, it may provide full text
of articles as well. Another vendor may only provide information on the
abstracts of articles. If you limit a search to ‘Full Text’, you will only get
articles from publishers, like Nature, who provide full text searching.
In a similar way,
the Table of Contents (TOC) limit will only search for the search terms in
records with a defined TOC. If the TOCs for certain records were not
contributed to Primo Central, the search will fail to find the records – even
if the search term shows up somewhere like the abstract.
My advice is
generally to limit searches after the fact using the facets under ‘Refine My
Results’. If you are doing a lot of searching in Primo Central, you may
find that certain fielded searches work well for your area of interest.
It is important to keep in mind that it is a subset of all the
potentially relevant information you could find.
Because the Primo
Central Index includes material from a large number of publishers, and the
composition changes frequently, it is difficult to provide guidance on which
fielded searches work best for which publishers.
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