Wildcard Searches using NewsBank

Wildcards are symbols that replace one or more letters or characters in a search term. They are helpful when you want to make sure you will find variants of your search term - child - children.

Single character wildcard: ? - Wom?n will find women or woman

Multiple character wildcard: * - environment* will find environment, environments, environmentalist, etc.

You can also place the * in the middle of a word. This is especially helpful for when you are unsure of the spelling. Wol*z will find Wolfowitz.

Searching NewsBank

When searching a name, always use NewsBank's proximity search. For example if you searched for "Mary Smith" you might not find articles that used "Mary Jones Smith". Here is NewsBank's proximity syntax: "mary near3 jones". NewsBank's search engine is not case sensitive.

This is also helpful when you don't remember all the words of an organization's name: "guilford near4 health" will find articles with the term, "Guilford County Department of Health". *note that you choose the number that will separate your two search words.