Searching Wildly for Thiophene

“If you feel the urge, don't be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for anyway?” -- Will Rogers (American entertainer, noted for his pithy and homespun humor, 1879-1935)

As great as is Google® Scholar for finding useful stuff, it lacks one important tool … the wild card search.

In search logic, a wild card is a symbol, most often an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?), that enables you to search for a root word and all the words containing the root with one simple search statement.

The wild card feature is one advantage commercial databases like Elsevier’s ScienceDirect (or SciVerse) have over search engines like Google and Yahoo!

Here is a simple example that illustrates the point … Click Advanced Search on the ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com) main page.  Click the Journals tab, select the Title field in the drop down, and enter the key word thiophene.

The result is about 2400 hits.

Now repeat the process, but this time enter the key word preceded with the asterisk (*) … in other words …

*thiophene

This time the results list contains over 5900 hits, including article titles containing the words benzothiophene, dibenzothiophene, as well as a whole lot of other “thiophenes.”

Try a similar search with your favorite chemical compound.