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Entering search words "correctly" (3/14)
Making your search query understandable and applicable to a search in a database is not always as easy as it is in Google. You should always make sure you spell all names correctly and do not make any typos. It is especially important to pay attention to:
If your search includes words in the German language, check if they have umlauts (ä, ö, ü) – some search tools cannot “read” them. It can be helpful to replace them with “ae”, “oe”, and “ue” or to simply omit the marks placed above them (a, e, u).
Correct spelling is just as important when it comes to English. What could be tricky here is the difference between British and American spelling - the same term can be spelled in different ways (e.g. dialog and dialogue).
Most of the time, accent (stress or diacritical marks placed above letters) can be omitted from search queries.
Words that contain a hyphen can be interpreted as one word or two words depending on a search platform. If this is your case, you can try searching for both variants.
Several words can be placed together into double inverted commas (quotation marks). This way, a database will search for these words together and retrieve results where these words appear as a phrase. For example, if our research deals with social media, results that contain the terms “social” and “media” separately and in other contexts will not be useful to us. However, with quotation marks, we can search a database for both words as a phrase.
If you are not certain about correct spelling of a word, you can look up the word in the index of the database or apply “truncation”. On the next page, we describe what truncation is and how you can make use of it in your search.