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Wild cards (truncation)

This article refers to the use of wild cards (or truncation) in Advanced search. Their use elsewhere is discussed under Easy search and Guided search.

FSTA Direct uses four types of field to hold data, of which two permit the use of wild cards - the character field type and the full text field type. (See the Table of fields and field codes for a full listing.) Full text fields use the CONTAINS match for searches whilst character fields use LIKE, STARTS WITH, or Exact (=).

Full text fields

There are four full text fields - Abstract (AB), All Fields (AF), Article Title (TI), and Source (SO) - and searches in these fields can use an asterisk (*) as a prefix wild card.

Example: to search for words beginning 'choc' in the article title (TI) field:

Navigate to the Advanced search screen
Select 'TI - Article title' from the first Field drop down menu
Note CONTAINS is automatically offered under 'Match'
In the 'Search terms' box enter choc* and click on the ' ' button
Click on Search to run this search

Note: the word-stemming wild card is not available in Advanced search.

Character fields

All fields (except for Date of Addition (DA) and Publication Year(PY)) can be searched using character field syntax, and two wild cards are available: * (suffix and prefix wild card) and ? (single-character wild card).

In Advanced search, when a character field is selected for searching, the INCLUDES and STARTS WITH match options automatically populate the search terms with asterisks.

Example: to search for the word 'Reading' in the Correspondence Address (AD) field

Navigate to the Advanced search screen
Select 'AD - Correspondence Address' from the first Field drop down menu
Select INCLUDES as the Match option
In the 'Search terms' box enter Reading and click on the button
Click on Search to run this search

Note that the wild card asterisks are automatically appended either side of the search term in the search builder

Example: to search for records from journals starting with the word 'Japanese'

Navigate to the Advanced search screen
Select 'PT - Publication Title' from the first Field drop down menu
Select STARTS WITH as the Match option
In the 'Search terms' box enter Japanese and click on the button
Click on Search to run this search

Note that the wild card asterisk is automatically appended after the search term in the search builder.

The ? wild card can be used when precise spelling is not known, e.g. in some authors' names.

Example: to search for authors with the name 'Olsen' or 'Olson'

Navigate to the Advanced search screen
Select 'AU - Author Individual' from the first Field drop down menu
Select STARTS WITH as the Match option
In the 'Search terms' box enter Ols?n and click on the button
Click on Search to run this search

The search returns results where the AU field includes variant spellings on the Olsen name.