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Truncation Searching
When you search, often times the database or search engine you are using may index articles under different forms of the word. For example banking and bankers. In order to avoid missing out on some good results, you should try truncating your search topic. In the above case, you'd revert to a root, such as bank and place an asterisk after it, like this: bank*. This will retrieve all variant endings of a word, including bank, banks, bankers, banking Be careful of truncating too much, which may lead to results you don't want.
from the HIS 270 - American Environmental History Research Guide.