Two methods of improving your searches, especially when dealing with search terms that include unknown characters or have variant endings or spellings, is to use Wildcard and Truncation symbols.

Using Wildcard Symbols

Using wildcard symbols will allow you to replace any unknown character in a word with a symbol such as an asterisk "*" or a "?". The database will then run the search for you and locate all word possibilities.

An example of using truncation in our topic of "women and war" would be wom?n. This will locate both the term women and the term woman.

Using Truncation

Using Truncation symbols is very similar to using Wildcard symbols, in the sense that you are asking the database to search for characters that you do not type in yourself. However, instead of searching for unknown letters, you use truncation to locate various endings for a word. To truncate a search term, you take the root of the word and place the truncation symbol at the end of the root. Truncation symbols, similar to wildcard symbols can take on various forms, but the most common are the asterisk "*" and the question mark “?”.

If we used truncation in our "women and war" search, we could truncate war*. This would locate other terms such as wars and warrior for us without requiring us to type out these variations and combine them with OR.

Be aware that truncation may also locate unexpected items. Truncating war* will also find warn, warning, wart, warm, warming and a number of other possibilities.

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