Finding scientific information

The truncation symbol is used to search for words that start with a certain set of letters.

Letters are removed from the end of the word and a truncation mark is added.
By truncating search terms you can include all the different forms of the word in your search, e.g. plurals and different cases. Be careful where you place the truncation point—if the root you use is too short, you might get way too many irrelevant results.

The most common symbol for truncation is the asterisk, *

econom* > economy, economics, economically, econometrics...
intercultural* > intercultural, interculturality, interculturalism...
work* > work, workers, working, workplace...

Sometimes, instead of truncation, it makes more sense to use the OR operator—especially if truncation brings in too many unwanted words:

sing* > sing, singer, singing, single, singularity, Singapore

Or if the database doesn’t retrieve your search term when it appears at the end of a compound word. For example, the search term

game  will not find the word videogame. 

Learn more about the OR-operator.  

Quotation marks are used to search for words that appear together, also known as phrase searching.

They are used when you want to search for

• phrases that have an established meaning. 
  • "social media"
  • "early childhood education"
  • "discourse analysis"
• hyphenated words
  • self-esteem can also be searched as "self esteem"
• consecutive words
  • "distance work*" OR "remote work*" OR "work* from home"...
• names of people and other multi-word names ;
  • "rosa liksom" OR "liksom rosa" 
  • "Rangifer tarandus tarandus"
• titles of publications ;
  • "Publication manual of the American Psychological Association"

In many databases, you can also use truncation within quotation marks, e.g.

"comput* think*" > "computational thinking", "computers think", "...computing: Thinkers...".

In Oula-Finna, you cannot use truncation within quotation marks.

Quotation marks prevent the automatic search for different inflected forms, e.g., in  Google Scholar.

Avoid using long phrase searches; instead, use the AND-operator or a proximity operator.

• "leadership in early childhood education"; better: leader* AND "early childhood education"

Proximity operator

• is better than the AND operator when you want to ensure that the words are in the same context, i.e., appear close to each other in the document
• is better than a phrase search when the topic can be expressed in multiple similar ways (e.g. energy policy, policy on energy, policy for renewable energy).

Many search engines skip so-called "stop words" (like prepositions, conjunctions, and other common words) that usually don't matter for search relevance. Database guides list these words and explain how to include a stop word in your search phrase if you need to.