Does Reaxys support wildcards?

Yes, Reaxys supports the use of wildcards in the following ways:

Quick Search

Quick Search supports the asterisk (*) as wildcards. It can be set at the beginning of a word (corresponds to a search “ends with”), in the middle of a word or at the end of a word (corresponds to a search “starts with”).

The asterisk (*) wildcard character searches any character, any amount of characters and no character. If asterisks are entered at the beginning and at the end of the word then a substring search is performed (corresponds to a search “contains”).

Please note: When used, the wildcard forces Reaxys to run only Document Basic Index searches (search in document titles, abstracts, index terms and keywords), i.e. query interpretation will be bypassed. For example:

• Entering ‘aspirin’ as query term typically results in a translation of the chemical name into a searchable structure query and, in addition, also a text query, which searches aspirin and all found synonyms in the Document Basic index.
• ‘aspir*’ instead will search the query term as entered in Document Basic Index finding all terms which start with ‘aspir’, e.g. aspirin, aspiration, aspirational etc.

Query Builder

Both the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?) wildcards are supported in text search fields:

• Any character replacement: asterisk (*) searches any character, any amount of characters and no character.
• bio* will find results including biotechnology, biofuel, bioprocess, biotin, biosensors, etc.
• Single character replacement: question mark (?) searches for one and only one character.
• bio? will find results including BiOX, BioH, bioB, etc
• bio??? will find results including biotin, biogas, BioExp, BiObry, etc.

Other examples

A Document Basic Index search for bio*ogy will find results for:

• biotribology, biotechnology, bioterminology, bionanotechnology, bioreheology, biometeorology, , bioarcheology, biology, biotechnology, biocenology, etc.

A Document Basic Index search for bio?ogy will find results for:

• biology