 phrase searching and truncation. Brought to you by CSUSB's John M. Fowl Library. In this video, we'll demonstrate how to use truncation and phrase searching in the library's databases. These two tips will leave you search savvy. Tip 1, phrase searching, allows you to place quotation marks around one or more words that you want to search together or as a phrase. For example, reproductive health will retrieve these two words in that order side by side. Leaving the quotation marks off might retrieve other results not relevant to your search, such as information about mental health or about reproduction in mice. Let's take a look at how this works in the database Psychinfo. Consider this search for reproductive health, which does not use quotation marks. We get lots of results, but if we scroll through our results list, we'll see that they aren't all relevant. We'll add quotation marks to force an exact phrase search. Now, instead of 9,000 results, we have fewer that appear to be much more relevant. Tip 2, truncation, allows you to insert a symbol, also called a wildcard, at the end of a word stem to retrieve various forms of one word, all through one search. For example, let's say we want to find multiple forms of the word environment. We can add an asterisk to the word stem environment. This will retrieve the stem word environment as well as environments, environmental, environmentally, and so on. Be smart about your truncation. If you truncate after the wrong letter, such as hist, not only will you retrieve history and historical, but also histogram, histrionic, and histamine. If you only want information related to history, you would add your wildcard after the R. You can also place wildcards within words. For example, a search like this will get woman and women. This is a great trick to use if you're not sure how a word is spelled or if it can be spelled in multiple ways. Globalization with a Z or an S, for instance. A search like this will retrieve both. Finally, you'll notice that we use the asterisk for truncation and the question mark for internal truncation. While these are common wildcards, each database is different. Refer to the Databases Help section here located in the upper right-hand corner if you need assistance identifying which wildcards to use.