Phrase searching involves placing multi-word terms (exact phrases) in quotation marks. The words are then searched together in the exact order they were entered into the search box.
Here are a few examples:
Using exact phrases improves the precision of search results by filtering out irrelevant records where the words appear separately or in a different order.
As explained in Section 2.1, some library databases automatically apply the Boolean operator AND between adjacent words. This means that when a search is performed using two words, the database retrieves results containing both terms, even if they do not appear next to each other.
To illustrate this, consider a title search for global economy in the EconLit database. The search returned 327 results; the first three are shown below.
It’s evident that the database interpreted the seach statement as a Boolean AND search – both global and economy appear in each title. However, only the third result contains the actual phrase global economy. In the other two, the words appear separately, and the articles are not specifically about the global economy.
Using quotation marks to search for the exact phrase "global economy" would have produced more relevant results.
Note Some databases automatically perform phrase searches. Refer to the database Help screens for more information.
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