week 6

Search Strategies

• Truncation
• Wildcard
• Phrase Searching

Truncation                     

        Truncation is a search method that allows you to find documents containing variations on a search item. It expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root. To do a truncation search, type the first few letters(stem) of the keyword followed by an asterisk(*). For e.g, teen* will teens, teenager, teenage and technolog* will return technology, technologies, technological etc.

Wildcard
          A wildcard is a special character such as an asterisk (*), question mark(?) or pound sign (#) that replaces one or more letters in a word. A wild card usually represents a single character. It is used in the middle of a word to match usually unknown variants of a term. For e.g, wom?n will return woman, women, and womyn.
Phrase searching          
          Phrase searching is when you use a string of words(instead of a single word) to search with. If you use phrase searching, you must put your phrase between  inverted comma " or brackets ( ) so that you can get the precise information of your term. For e.g, type like "carbon neutral", "information literacy" etc.