Tip #57: Using Quotes Around Single-Word Terms in PubMed + Other Databases
Many thanks to Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian at Florida State University Libraries, for this week's tip! As librarians and search experts, we are all accustomed to "phrase searching" where putting two or more words together in "quotation marks" looks for those words together in that order in the search results rather than separately anywhere in an article or other resource. However, we don’t typically expect that adding quotation marks versus leaving them off would make a difference for single-word terms, as can be seen here in an example from Embase. Result #1 shows how Embase translates a search for discrimination typed into the basic search box—it yields results for the Emtree term ‘discrimination’/exp or the plain keyword. Embase also shows ‘single quotations’ in the search history, regardless of whether the typed-in search used those or "double quotations". In short, Embase yields the same number of results for a single-word term with an...