How truncation, wildcards, stemming and lemmatization help your literature search
Description
This guide explains how to enhance literature searches using truncation, wildcards, stemming, and lemmatization. Truncation adds symbols like * or $ to capture word variations (e.g., “toxin*” returns toxin, toxins, toxinogenic). Wildcards help account for spelling differences, and stemming and lemmatization expand results by including different word endings and grammatical forms. Together, these techniques help researchers retrieve more comprehensive results, improving search accuracy and relevance across databases.