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AT 492 Senior Seminar - Hammerschmidt

Boolean Operators

In Advanced Search, you can use Boolean Operators to expand or limit your search.

Put each word or phrase on each line and modify the Boolean option as necessary:

Wildcards and Tuncation

Using wildcards and truncation is a way to expand your search possibilities. These techniques work in most databases (but not all). There are no wildcard or truncation options in Science Direct.

Wildcards — a symbol used to represent any character. Wildcards can usually be used at the end of a word or within a word. The pound symbol (#) is used in many databases as a wildcard and sometimes the asterisk (*). You can use this symbol to search variant spellings of a word. You can use more than one pound sign to stand in for more than one character. Each pound sign represents 0-1 characters.

     Example: wom#n retrieves woman or women
                    In some databases: wom*n retrieves woman or women

Truncation — a symbol added to the end of the root of a word to instruct the database to search for all forms of a word. The asterisk (*) is used in many databases for truncation.

     Example: adolescen* retrieves adolescent, adolescents, or adolescence