This is part two of our series on the tricks that we, the Jones Librarians, use to get to the information we want more quickly. Chilly is also indulging his troublesome love of awful puns and terrible movie sequels, but I digress.
Putting your terms in quotation marks searches for exactly those words in that order. Without quotation marks, it searches for those terms in any old way. Using quotation marks with a phrase also can dramatically reduce the number of results returned to you.
I just typed the phrase study English pronunciation into the library’s search engine, it returned tens of thousands of results. The top hit was contained the phrase “Using computer-assisted pronunciation teaching in English pronunciation instruction: A study on the impact and the Teacher’s role”.
But when I typed “study English pronunciation” (inside quotation marks) into the same window, it returned only 38 results, and the top hit contained the sentence “... However, there are few environments where we can speak English outside of the classroom, so Japanese students rarely have a chance to study English pronunciation …”
You see? The search engine returned only documents containing the exact phrase inside the quotation marks.
Without quotation marks, the engine returned any document containing those three words in any order and any distance from one another.
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