Quiz: Page 1.a. Combine Keywords to Get Control of Your Results -- "Phrase Searching"

Getting Control of Your Results

As you saw in the previous lesson, the keywords you brainstorm are just the start.  Then you have to organize your keywords into search strings.  Search strings are the combination of words and punctuation that you type into the database and small changes in your search string can have big effects on your results.

To write a search string you have to decide how to combine your keywords and what search techniques to use.  Every change you make to how you combine and format your keywords will either broaden your search or narrow your search and you are always looking for the right balance.  A search that is too broad will bring you too many results that are not relevant to your question.  A search that is too narrow will miss results that would have been relevant.  By using search techniques, you can balance between being too broad and too narrow, and you can find most of the articles that are relevant to you.

Phrase Searching Using Quotation Marks

As you saw in the interactive lesson, some keywords are actually phrases, made up of two or more words.

Some examples of phrases are:

"social support"

"stress management"

"cultural values"

"Mexican American"

"folk horror"

"social justice"

"anxiety disorder"

In order to search these phrases in the databases, they should be written in quotation marks. 

How does using quotation marks around phrases help you to control your results? 

Putting the phrases in your search into quotation marks will narrow your results by only finding the sources where those words are next to each other in that order.  Without quotation marks, you're likely to get a lot of irrelevant results because the database is searching for the words separately, anywhere in the full text of the articles.

How the Search Looks in the Database

Without the quotation marks, a search string that includes all of the same words will return over 400 results, because the database will find the words separately, instead of only finding them when they appear together in a phrase.