Wildcard/Truncation (Information Literacy)

.
 They were only two topics for week six :

• Truncation 
• Wild Card

Truncation: 

Truncation and wildcards broaden your search capabilities by allowing you to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word or word stem, such as singular and plural forms.

Truncation is using a wildcard at the end of a root word to search multiple variations of that root word. Check a database's help section to identify what symbol is used for a wildcard.

For example : protect* OR conserv* OR regulat* would retrieve multiple spellings of these synonyms.

Wildcard :

A character that substitutes for any other character or character range in regular expressions and globbing or 

 wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. A wildcard usually represents a single character.

Lecturer also taught us about phrase searching. Phrase searching is when you use a string of words (instead of a single word) to search with. By using phrase searching you will retrieve fewer results!