When designing a search strategy, in order to be as comprehensive as possible, it is necessary to include a wide range of free-text terms for each of the concepts selected. For example:
synonyms: ‘pressure sore’ OR ‘decubitus ulcer’, etc;
related terms: ‘brain’ OR ‘head’, etc; and
variant spellings: ‘tumour’ OR ‘tumor’.
Service providers offer facilities to capture these variations through truncation and wildcards:
truncation: random* (for random or randomised or randomized or randomly, etc); and
wildcard: wom?n (for woman or women).
These features vary across service providers. For further details refer to the service provider help files for the database in question.