Search Tips: Truncation Searching and Using Wildcard Symbols

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 words you are not interested in. Most databases require you to use at least three letters before truncating.

The most common truncation symbol is the asterisk* but some databases use different symbols – check the database help pages to be sure.

Examples of Database Truncation Symbols

Scopus = *
Web of Science = *
Medline (Ovid) = *
Ebscohost (APA PsycInfo, Business Source Premier, CINAHL) = *
ProQuest (Sociological Abstracts, Early Modern Books) = *

Using wildcards

Wildcards are useful when you have British and American spellings for words. A wildcards search will allow you to replace one letter in a search term:

randomi?ed = randomised or randomized

behavio?r = behaviour or behavior

Databases use different wildcard symbols – check the database help pages.

Examples of Database Wildcard Symbols

Scopus = spelling variants are automatically searched for.
Web of Science = ? represents any single character, $ represents zero or one character.
Medline (Ovid) = ?
Ebscohost (APA PsycInfo, Business Source Premier, CINAHL) = #
ProQuest (Sociological Abstracts, Early Modern Books) = ?

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