Truncation (4/14)

Truncation is a searching technique in which you substitute the ending of a search word with a symbol (also referred to as a “wildcard”). Library catalogues and databases automatically fill in all possible word endings, which means that with only one search query you can look for different word forms, e.g. different syntactic and grammatical categories, compounds, or British and American spelling.

Your search results might also give you some new ideas of which word forms you can include in your list of search terms (chapter 2). Some databases enable you to replace characters in the beginning or within a word as well. You will find different options explained in detail on the help page of the Göttingen University Catalogue (GUK).