LSU Libraries - Searching Techniques and Strategies Tutorial

CONTENTS:

Introduction
Generating Search Terms
Boolean Searching
Combining Terms
Truncation
Field Searching

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Truncation, Cont.

The real strength of truncation is pulling up related words with different endings.

Let's say we needed to search for any and everything on librarianship. We might type in librar?, which would bring up librarian, librarianship, library, and anything else that began with the letters librar.

Beware! Think carefully before you stick a truncation mark in your search. If you don't put enough characters before or after the mark, you'll be inundated with matches. Do a search on cat? and you'll get records containing the words cat, cats, catastrophe, catenate, category, catalog, catatonic, and on, and on, and on...

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