Using wildcards - instruction

You may search for all singular, plural, American or English words separately, but it is more efficient to use wildcards for truncation or masking of words.

Truncation is putting a symbol at the end of a word in order to catch all variant endings of that word when searching a database. In some bibliographies truncation can also be used at the beginning or in the middle of a word.

Basically, there are three different types of wildcards:

A wildcard that replaces one single character

• for example:
  wom?n finds woman and women
  analy?e finds analyze and analyse

A wildcard that replaces zero or one character

• for example:
  cat? finds cat, cats and Catz
  colo?r finds color and colour

A wildcard that replaces zero or more characters

• for example:
  cat* finds words starting with cat, e.g. cat, cats, catalogue, caterpillar, etc.
  *caroten* finds words such as carotenoids, beta-carotene, β-carotene, alpha-carotene, carotenes, etc.
  int*net finds internet and intranet

Truncation in the middle of a word is also called masking.

Symbols used as wildcards may differ between databases. It is advised to consult the search tips or the help file of the database, in which you want to search, to find out which ones are used.