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Literature searching

Enhance your search terms

There are some techniques you can apply to your search terms to enhance your search.

Finding variants of a search term

Most resources allow you to add the asterisk * (Truncation symbol) at the end of a word stem to find variants of that word. It is particularly useful for retrieving both the singular and the plural forms of a word in the same search e.g.:

If you enter the term university into a database you will only retrieve results where that exact term appears.

If you enter universit* you will find university or universities.

Truncation will thus expand the number of results you find.

Truncation is a useful technique but be careful when using it. For example truncating the term family (famil*) will find both the terms family and families BUT ALSO terms such as familiar which are irrelevant and would lead to lots of irrelevant results.

In this case it would be best to enter the terms like this: family OR families

Phrase searching

In most resources entering a phrase such as learning support will search for each term separately as the AND operator is automatically placed between your terms e.g learning AND support. This means that you will find results which contain the phrase but also results where the terms appear separately, leaving you with some irrelevant results.

If you want to restrict your search to only the phrase, place speech marks "  " around your terms e.g. "learning support"