UBC Library Informatics for Nursing

• In most databases you can search for plurals or variant spellings of a word by typing a symbol in place of the final letters of the words. This is called truncation. For example, in CINAHL, a search for nurs* will retrieve records containing the words:
  
  The * is the truncation symbol for the CINAHL database and many other databases.

Caution: Each interface works differently. Check in the Help to learn how that interface works. For example, truncation is NOT recommended in PubMed as it turns off the automatic mapping to MeSH.