Week 6

Apply selected tools and strategies to locate  information

Truncation and Wildcard

Truncation:

• Truncation expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root .

You can see from the example that with one single keystroke, the * symbol, you can go from searching a single word to searching many variations of the word.

In any database, look for Search Tips or Help to see what symbols the database uses for truncation. You'll probably find that, in addition to truncating, the database offers other techniques for manipulating words. Truncation can also be used on many search engines.

Example: teen* will return teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.)

Wildcard:

• A Wildcard is used in the middle of a word to match usually known variants of a term. A wildcard usually represents a single character,
• The wildcard symbol can be used to replace one letter in a word. This will instruct the computer to do a search and match all letters in the word and use any letter to replace the wildcard symbol.

• VERY IMPORTANT: The TRU library catalogue uses “$”, but all of the article databases use “*” for their truncation and wildcard symbols.

Example: wom?n will return woman, women, and womyn.