United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

FAQ: NLM® LocatorPlus® - Wildcard Characters

Question: Is it possible to use wildcards or other special characters when I search LocatorPlus?

Answer:

Wildcard characters and other special characters you can use are:

Question mark (?)

The question mark can substitute for zero, one, or more characters at the beginning, middle, or end of the term.

Example	Retrieves
neuro?pharmacology	neuropharmacology, neuropsychopharmacology
h?ematology	hematology or haematology
?clinic	clinic, polyclinic, multiclinic, teleclinic, etc.
clinic?	clinic, clinics, clinical, clinician, clinicians, etc.

Note: the asterisk is not available as a wildcard in LocatorPlus because it is used in Voyager to increase the relevance of a term. The question mark wildcard does not work in Z39.50 searches of LocatorPlus.

Percent (%)

The percent sign can be used at the beginning, middle, or end of a search term and can be used to represent one character or in multiples to represent a specific number of characters:

Example	Retrieves
wom%n	woman or women
clinic%	clinics, clinica, clinico, etc.
clinic%%%	clinician, clinicals, etc.

Note: the percent sign wildcard does not work in Z39.50.

Quotation marks ("")

Use double quotes to enclose a phrase: "popular works"

Plus sign (+)

Use a plus sign before a term to indicate that it is an essential term: +leukemia

Asterisk (*)

Use an asterisk before a term to weight it as important: *therapy

Example of Keyword Anywhere search using several special characters:

child? "popular works" +leukemia *therapy

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http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/wildcards.html

Last reviewed: 29 September 2009
Last updated: 29 September 2009
First published: 22 February 2007
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanence Not Guaranteed