Sometimes, you will need to search for a concept, proper name, or title that contains multiple words in a specific order. Generally, databases are better now about recognizing concepts that contain multiple words and produce relevant search results. Still, databases need your assistance to retrieve results with words in an intended order.

For instance, when searching for church music, some databases will search church AND music as two distinct words instead of a type of music for performance in religious worship. Initially, you might retrieve relevant results, but the further along in perusing the results, the words church or music might appear separately in the results but not together in the correct order as a unit, church music. To retrieve results with search terms in a specific order, put quotation marks around the phrase, e.g. “church music.” For some databases, you will need to use parenthesis, like this: (church music). This is especially useful when searching for proper names.

For example, when searching in Google, my search term for church music retrieved about 2,450,000,000 results and my search for “church music” retrieved 4,860,000 results. Regardless, both searches yield an immense amount of results, but using double quotations narrows the search significantly by keeping the words of the phrase in a specific order.

You can also create complex searches by combining two phrase in a Boolean search, so "church music" AND "liturgical music".