IFIS Publishing

Yes, but there are things to bear in mind. 

As it is a simple search engine which searches for these automatically, it is not designed for using Boolean operators and truncation (wildcard *). You can use them but they have limitation and won't work as well as they would in an academic search platform, which is designed for them.

If you want to try a wildcard search, read on... 

You can use a wildcard at the end of your search term but only if you are working in a single search box. You can type the beginning of a term and then add an asterisk following the characters you have typed, with no space. This will return results that have words that have the letters you typed plus any letters following from where the asterisk fell. Typing toxi* will give you results containing toxic, toxics, toxicant, toxicants, toxicity, toxin, toxins, etc.

Bear in mind: Wildcard searches search text strings only, and only produce search results relevant to that string. Search terms without wildcards search the text string, but also use a variety of other search methods such as stemming, synonyms and weighting to generate your search results. 

So, let's look at some sample searches around probiotics and see what this means in practice. 

We can see from the table that searching for the plural probiotics brought back more search results than searching for the singular with a wildcard probiotic*. At first glance, this seems a bit confusing, but we're pleased to say that all you need to do is a simpler search.

We'll explain now why this happens. 

If you search for the term probiotic*, the SOLR technology means the platform is looking for search results with the term 'probiotic' PLUS one or more character, e.g. 'probiotics'.

This means the search results would actually excludes results with the singular 'probiotic' only, as it has no subsequent characters that could be picked up by that wildcard *.

The search term probiotics brings back more search results because the smart SOLR technology assumes the 's' to be a plural and it is also returns results with 'probiotic' (singular). 

One you add a '*', it believes you only want results with 'probiotic' PLUS one or more characters. It stops doing its 'smart' search and just matches 'probiotic' as a stem. 

If you want to use '*' as a wildcard, chop a few letters off the end of the word first, e.g. probio*