TRUNCATION AND WILDCARD
Allows a single search to retrieve variant forms of a single string of letters. Truncation is usually indicated by an asterisk (*). One major exceptions in our database is Lexis-Nexis Academic, which uses the exclamation mark (!). Thus, in almost all databases, the search string
nationalis*
will retrieve records containing “nationalism,” “nationalist,” “nationalistic,” etc. Some databases including Google automatically truncate searches, so the asterisk is redundant in Google.
Databases that use the asterisk tend to use the question mark for a single wildcard character. So, for example, in most databases,
wom?n
will retrieve records containing both “woman” and “women.”