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 “alternative therapies,” “heart attacks,” “Xray technicians” or "chronic pain" 

Then you are probably looking for those two words to appear next to each other, with no other words in between, in the document's text. 

To ensure that the database searches this phrase correctly, you can put quotation marks around your search term and force the database to search it as a phrase. 

For example,

If you click on the two examples, you should see when using the phrase searching methods that there are significantly fewer results when quotation marks are added. 

• without quotation marks 

  • High cholesterol

• with quotation marks 

  • "High cholesterol" 

Be careful when you use phrase searching; if you put too many words in quotation marks, the database will likely not find any results. Only use phrase searching on established phrases—words that you can reasonably expect other authors to use.

In the health sciences, health conditions containing more than one word should always be added with quotation marks.  

Another important note is about phrasing searches (when you enclose your keywords in quotation marks). While this can be useful, it can also limit your results.  

For example, searching for "college students" or "university students" means the terms need to be in that exact order, which could make you miss useful results like: 

• Students enrolled in college 

• Students pursuing higher education 

• Students studying at college 

• Undergraduates at college 

• Undergraduates at university 

• College's student body 

• University participants 

Instead, break the concepts about university and student out into separate keyword searches

For example:  

("university" OR college OR "post-secondary" OR "higher education" OR undergrad OR undergraduate) AND (student). 

Truncation is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings. 

Truncation is useful when one of your keywords has several endings, but all variations represent the same idea.  

Using truncation will help you complete your search faster because you will not have to manually type in and search every variation of the word. 

To truncate a search term, do a keyword search in a database, but remove the ending of the word and add the correct truncation symbol to the end of the word. The database will retrieve results that include every word that begins with the letters you entered. 

For example, 

• surg* = surgery, surgeries, surgeon, or surgical 
• genetic* = genetic, genetics or genetically 

• child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood 

Not all words are suited to truncation. 

For example: 

• mat*= Maternal, Matter, Maternity, Mathematics, Materials and Matrix