| 3-USING QUEST | MODULE CONTENTS |
Truncation and Wildcards
You can use truncation and wildcard searching to include possible variants of the your search terms. Truncation means shortening a word to its root form, and then adding a special character or symbol to ensure that any word that begins with that root will be retrieved. This is a useful way to search for plural and other grammatical forms of a word. In Quest the truncation symbol is $. If you enter nurs$, Quest will find nurse, nurses, nursing, and so on.A wildcard is a symbol that can replace a single letter within a word. Quest’s wildcard is ?. If you enter wom?n, Quest will find both women and woman.
Both wildcard and
truncation are used in this search combining the concepts of women and
nursing.
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Original (c) UNBLILT material 2003-2004 by the University of New Brunswick Libraries, Instruction Services Group. UNBLILT incorporates material from Searchpath, a tutorial developed by Western Michigan University 2001-2002, and from TILT, a tutorial developed by the Digital Information Literacy Office for the University of Texas System Digital Library 1998-2002. This material may be reproduced, distributed, or incorporated only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the UNBLILT, Searchpath, and TILT Open Publication Licenses.