Quiz: Page 1.c. Combine Keywords to Get Control of Your Results -- Truncation Search*

  • Due No due date
  • Points 1
  • Questions 1
  • Time Limit None

Instructions

Truncation

As you saw in the lesson, truncation searching, also called wildcard searching, is when you use the asterisk symbol to replace one or more letters in your keywords.

Here are some examples of truncations and explanations of what they are doing:

education* will search for the words education, educational, educationally

educat* will search for the words educator, educators, educated, education, educational, educationally

psycholog* will search for the words psychology, psychologies, psychologize, psychologized, psychologist, psychologists, psychological, psychologically

psych* will search for dozens of words 

From these examples, you can see that where you put the truncation has a big affect on what words the database will match in the articles. 

How does using truncation help you to control your results?

Using truncation is a great way to expand your search without having to think of all the forms of your keyword that will be relevant to you.  Using truncation is likely to add articles to your results that you will be glad to have. 

How the Search Looks in the Database

Searching the databases for the search string student AND stress* AND "anxiety disorder" generates a list of 348 results.

 

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