Module 3: SDLN Examples and Practice Search Techniques -- Truncation

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Truncation is a way of searching for a word with all its various word endings.

Many search systems search for the exact word that you type, so if you search for the term "educate," the system does not search for related terms such as education, educator, educators, etc. To search for all of these in SDLN, you would type:

educate or education or educator or educators

However, many search systems, including SDLN, let you truncate the word and use a "wildcard" character to represent the alternative word endings.

For example, in any SDLN database, to search for "educate," "education," "educator" or "educators" at one time, type:

educat#

To use truncation, find the letters that each of the alternative endings shares and attach the wildcard character to the end. Please note that the pound sign (#) is used by SDLN, but other search systems use different wildcards (such as an asterisk or a question mark).

For example, to search for censor, censored, censorship, type:

censor#

For example, to search for primary or primaries, type:

primar#

For example, to search for dog or dogs (but will also retrieve dogma, etc.), type:

dog#

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