TOPIC 6

Truncation and Wildcards

Truncation and wildcards broaden your search capabilities by allowing you to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word or word stem, such as singular and plural forms.

So, what are they?

v Wildcard

A wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. Additionally, a Wildcard is used in the middle of a word to match usually known variants of a term and it usually represents a single character. For instance: wom?n will return woman, women, and womyn.

v Truncation

Truncation is using a wildcard at the end of a root word to search multiple variations of that root word. Check a database's help section to identify what symbol is used for a wildcard. As the result, Truncation expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root. For example: teen* will return teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.)

 

Phrase Searching

Phrase searching is when you use a string of words (instead of a single word) to search with. Sometimes we are searching for two or more words in our search. In order to get the right information that we need, we have to use either bracket/parenthesis () between prhases or inverted commas “. As the example of these, (information literacy) or “information literacy”.