Expert Research Tip: Truncate

The word "truncation" always makes me think of elephants, although in the context of research and database searching, this doesn't really make sense...although, it kind of does, now that I think about it, since it will (possibly) enlarge the relevant results that you receive!

Truncation allows you to capture the various permutations of a word, so that you can grab a topic from various contexts found within the literature.


Let's say that you're interested in researching factors that motivate children to increase fruit and vegetable intake. The search that you put together might look something like:  (children or child) and (motivate or motivation or motivating) and (fruit or vegetable).  Wouldn't it be great if you could capture "children or child" and "motivate or motivation or motivating" in a simpler way?  Well, that's exactly what truncation does.

In most databases, the truncation symbol is an asterisk--*.  There are some databases that use other characters (perhaps a $ or a !), but for most of the databases you will search in (PubMed and Addison, specifically), you will use the asterisk.  Basically, you'll just cut off the word where the different endings occur and add the asterisk.  This allows you to receive all versions of a word, as it is found within the literature, in your results.  Using truncation, the search above will look like:  child* and motivat* and (fruit or vegetable). Pretty cool!

Using truncation can clean up your search, and possibly retrieve results that you didn't think to search for.  Try it and see how it works for you!

Example of truncation in Addison