Plurals, truncation, wildcards, and proximity

Plurals

To search for a word and its plural form, add a plus sign + to the singular form. The plus + will search for any plural formed with either -s or -es. For example, giraffe+ retrieves all records that contain giraffe and giraffes.

To search for the plural of words that change form, such as mouse or story, search for both forms and combine them with the Boolean operator OR. For example, to retrieve mouse and its plural, search for mouse OR mice.

Truncation

Truncation allows you to search for a term and its variations by entering a minimum of the first three letters of the term followed by an asterisk *. For example, securit* retrieves records that contain security, securities, securitization, etc.

 Note: Truncation can only be used after the third character. Also, truncation is currently set to read a limit of 50 index entries; this limit was devised to achieve better performance by the FirstSearch system and will result in an error message if the user enters a truncation query that is too general.

Wildcards

Wildcards are used to represent from zero to nine additional characters in a search term. They are useful when you are unsure of spelling, when there are alternate spellings, or when you only know part of a term. FirstSearch recognizes two wildcards.

A pound sign # represents a single character.

A question mark ?, alone or with a number, represents from zero to nine additional characters. Include a number if you know the maximum number of characters the wildcard will replace. Otherwise, use the question mark ? alone to represent any number of characters within a single term, including no additional characters.

 Note: Wildcards can only be used after the third character of a term.

Adjacent terms (proximity)

To find terms within a certain distance of other terms, use the proximity operators w or n followed by a number. You can string together multiple terms and proximity operators, such as curator n2 art w3 forgery, and you can use phrases with a proximity operator, such as space shuttle n4 orbit.