... Exact phrase

Combining words using quotation marks

Sometimes you want to search for an exact word combination.

You can put word combinations or whole sentences between quotation marks. This combination or sentence must then appear exactly as it appears in the document you are looking for. This is very useful if you are searching for a name or a compound term.

Caution! You may miss articles that are about your topic. For example, you search for the exact word combination

"online lecture"

With this combined, you won't find articles with

"lecture in an online learning environment"

You do find those articles with the search

online AND lecture

You can also specify that search terms must occur a certain distance apart. That can make a huge difference in the noise between your results.

 

Nice to know: proximity operators


To make sure you only find documents where your search terms are close together, you can use so-called proximity or adjacency operators. How this works varies by database. Below are the most common ones:

NEAR/x
 

example online NEAR/3 lecture
explanation There is a maximum of three words between online and lecture. You can change this number by changing the number
databases Web of Science and all Proquest databases such as Sociological Abstracts and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
word order In Proquest databases use PRE/x if word order is important.



ADJx
 

example online ADJ3 lecture
explanation There are a maximum of two words between "online" and "lecture" (the last word is included, so you end up with ADJ3). You can change this number by changing the number
databases Ovid databases such as PsycINFO, Medline and ERIC


Nx

example online N3 lecture
explanation There are up to three words between 'online' and 'lecture'. You can change this number by changing the number
databases EBSCO databases such as Anthropology Plus, Academic Search Premier and CINAHL
word order If word order is important use W

 

Check a database's manual for more information.