Truncating search terms is available in the keyword search fields and is useful for two reasons. The first is you can simultaneously search all the suffixes on a search term, such as plurals - with one search. The other is that it forgives poor spelling of medical search terms. Truncation is applied with a question mark after the search term with no space.
Truncation includes the root word before the question mark as well as all variant endings.
A truncated search term may retrieve unwanted records because it is a less precise search. A truncation search is suffix-oriented so it will not retrieve search terms with prefixes. An ill-formed truncation search term may exclude important search terms and omit records you want to find.