The term lemmatization refers to a search engine algorithm that looks at the keyword entered in a search and breaks it down to its root or 'lemma'. The algorithm then includes variants of the root in the search to expand the retrieval so you find additional items that may be highly relevant. Lemmatization is the default setting when searching Web of Science.

With lemmatization a search on the keyword sing will also return items with the keywords sang, sung, sings, singing - all of which may be relevant to the question that prompted your search.

Using a wildcard or truncation can bring back unwanted variants of your keyword while lemmatization is designed to retrieve variants that are specifically related to your keyword. If you were to search sing* to find items with sings and singing, you would not find items that only use the variant sang or sung and you would also find other words such as single, singular, singularity and Singapore.

Lemmatization can be disabled by:

• using a wildcard with your keyword, in the left-hand position *typic, the right-hand position grass* or internally organi?ation, or;
• enclosing your keyword in quotation marks or inverted commas.

Web of Science is available via the UQ Library.

And here's a lemming ...