Using "Wildcards"
The wildcard character (*) can be used to search the beginning fragments of words, forcing a match with any word containing a given root. Although this function is somewhat duplicated with the search engine's Stemming feature, proper use of a wildcard can return a range of potentially interesting documents. For example, a search for
"child*"
will return articles containing "child, childcare", and "children"; likewise, a search for
"phospha*"
will return articles containing "phosphatase" and "phosphate".
Wildcards can also be used to truncate words before non-English characters such as an umlaut (ü) or an accent (é). Since these characters cannot be searched, a word such as the author name "Grundström" should be searched as "Grundstr*". Note that wildcards can only be used after characters; any characters following a wildcard in a single word will be discarded, and may cause an error.
