DWLresearch

  When you're doing a literature search there may be lots of variations of words you want to search on, to ensure you're finding all the different ways someone may have written about a topic. Truncation searching and using wildcards helps you to search for word variations without having to type in every single variations yourself. These techniques only work in specialist literature databases that support truncation or wildcards. Search engines such as Google and Google Scholar do not support these options. Some databases do automatically look for variations in spellings and the singular/plural of words, but you can ensure they are doing this by using the tips below: Truncation Searching If you want to search on the plural, singular and other variations of the same word you can use truncation: exercise* = will find exercise, exercises, exercising, exercised Do not truncate too early in a word – e.g. exer* = would find the above but also exercycle, exergonic, exertion, and other ...