Question: Is it better to use quotation marks or parentheses with my keywords, and what’s the difference?

You can use either technique to improve your search in different ways. 

Quotation marks are used around keywords or phrases that have multiple parts, such as in: “library science.”  This keeps both words together during the search as one unified phrase. 

Parentheses can be used to group like terms together when using the Boolean operators AND, OR, or NOT, such as in: (colleges OR universities).  This would return results that include both colleges as well as universities in the results. 

You can view more information on improving your research at the Research Skills and Resources guide or the How to Search a Database guide.