Why might you want to put quotation marks around the words in your database search?
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Keywords are typically words/short phrases in natural language which describe what you want to search for. Think about how you might search Google: Show Bus timetable Opening hours Cat memes When thinking about academic research, you will want to pick out key themes from your assignment title/essay plan/literature review outline. There are some useful writing guides which demonstrate how to do this. The words relating to these themes should form the basis of your keyword search. The rules of AND, OR and NOT are very useful when considering how to search for keywords. If you type Harry Potter into a search engine it will naturally search for Harry AND Potter - meaning you may find publications written by Harry Smith and John Potter, for example. You can use quotation marks to force a phrase search "Harry Potter" to narrow your results down. More on phrase searching below. Subject headingsIn contrast to keywords, subject headings represent a controlled vocabulary based on a subject area. If a database uses subject headings then the results will be more accurate when these are used instead of keywords. It may also change the way you search. You will commonly see these on our health databases (e.g. CINAHL) which use the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).  If you need help with subject headings, contact us via chat or book a tutorial. PhrasingPhrase searching is a way of making your search more specific via proximity. Some search engines automatically treat all words as a phrase, others automatically place AND in between words unless you use quotation marks or parentheses (brackets) around them to force a phrase. Example The search tulips in spring is actually a search for tulips AND spring (see "stop words" [right] to see why "in" wasn't included in the search). BCU Library Search uses quotation marks for a forced phrase. "tulips in spring" Some other databases/search engines might also treat (tulips in spring) as a phrase. Most databases contain a guide to explain how their Boolean connectors are used and how phrase searching is performed. Stop wordsStop words are the most common words which you'll find in each language. When you search for a stop word, most databases will ignore them during a basic keyword search. These are just some the words ignored by Library Search: A Are Few He I Itself Me No Of She The What If these words are crucial to the meaning of your search, you will need to use quotation marks " " to force the database/search engine to use them. Here is a list of stop words from multiple languages. Example If you search for man of the year, Library Search will ignore the words "of" and "the", meaning it will find any publications mentioning both "man" AND "year". If you search for "man of the year" with quotations, it will find that exact phrase, including "of" and "the" in that order. Phrase searching is a very effective way of narrowing your search to documents on your topic. By putting quotation marks around two or more words, you force the database or search engine to find your words together in the document instead of separately. For example, if you search for food security without quotation marks, you will receive results which have the word food in them and the word security in them, but not necessarily together. If you search "Food Security", you will only receive results with that exact phrase. To see this in action, try a search in your favourite search engine for the words food security with no quotation marks. Now try a search for "food security". How do the results differ? Phrase searching narrows your search results by allowing you to define precisely how you want the words to appear. For example, if you are searching for information on job satisfaction then you are probably looking for those two words to appear right next to each other, with no other words in between, in the text of the document. To make sure that the database searches this correctly you can put quotation marks around your search term and force the database to search this as a phrase. Be careful when you use phrase searching; if you put too many words in quotations the database will most likely not find any results. You want to only use phrase searching on established phrases - words that you can reasonably expect other authors used. Why would you use quotation marks when searching in a database?Phrase Searching with Quotation Marks
When you surround your search terms with quotation marks, you are telling the database that the words must appear as an exact phrase.
What is the purpose of quotation marks in a text?Quotation marks (inverted commas) are used for a variety of reasons. They are used to show the exact words someone has spoken or written (a direct quote), or to identify specialist terms. They may also be used to draw attention to words or phrases.
When should you use quotation marks in library databases?Sometimes you may want to search for a phrase (2 or more words) in a database. When you are searching phrases, put quotation marks around the phrase. This will tell the database to search the phrase as a whole, instead of as individual words.
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