It's easy to exclude relevant items. While most systems are case insensitive, a few systems, such as Britannica Online , require you to type Boolean operators in upper case. Truncation or Wildcards A symbol at the end of a word stem provides for all variants on the word stem. Internal Truncation A symbol within a word provides for all possible variants inside a word or word stem. Look at the help pages for the database you are using to determine the truncation symbols.
Most systems provide truncation but some provide only simple plurals.
Phrase Searching Some databases, such as GIL, will allow you to indicate phrases by enclosing the phrase in quotes.