Developing a Research Strategy

Truncation is a search strategy that allows you to search for words that start the same but have multiple endings such as crime, criminal, and criminals.

Truncation is especially useful when you want a database to return both the singular and plural versions of a word such as film and films.

The problem is that not all databases use the same truncation symbol. Usually, you need to look at the "help" screen to find out what symbol it uses. Three common truncation, or "wildcard," symbols are:

Using truncation can simplify your search string. For instance, an example search string from our "crime films" topic can be quite long.

(film OR films OR movie OR movies OR motion picture OR motion pictures) AND (crime OR crimes OR criminal OR criminals OR villain OR villains)

Using * as a truncation symbol, the search string can be simplified to:

(film* OR movie* OR motion picture*) AND (crim* OR villain*)