Phrase searching
Sometimes you might want to search for a phrase, rather than individual terms, especially if the terms are common words. This is known as phrase searching.
For example, you might be looking for information on distance learning.
Each of these as stand-alone words have different meanings and will retrieve irrelevant documents to the needs of the researcher. However, when you put them together, the meaning changes to a distinct concept. In order for a database or search engine to understand this, you must put your phrase in inverted commas.
The keyword to use in the search engine is therefore: "distance learning".
The phrase can contain more than two words. For example, "British visual culture" will return results that contain the three words together as a phrase and not just documents with the keywords British, visual and culture anywhere in the text.
Phrase searching is discussed in the video below using JSTOR to demonstrate.
Transcript of the Video (Word File)
