Speling, or you say caesarean, I say caesarian

I always mention in literature searching classes - if you don't find many results, check your spelling.   And my slide says speling, ha ha. 

It all started with a tweet from Janice Kung, Health Sciences Librarian, @janicekung, at the University of Alberta, pointing out the need to search for typos and spelling mistakes when searching the literature.  Tom Roper, retired health librarian, @tomroper, who I follow, replied, which is how I saw it, and included his video on the topic.  The video explores the reasons for some misspellings, including authors thinking a word is Latin in origin when it is Greek.   

One of Tom's examples is caesarean, which I have to admit is a word I always have to think about when spelling or searching.  Being midwifery librarian, it's a word I encounter quite often.

Another example mentioned by Megan Kennedy, @MeganSansH, also a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, was the various spellings of Cinahl.

I had noticed before when searching that you sometimes retrieve results when you spell something incorrectly.   But I had not thought of the implications of that.   If you are doing a systematic review, shouldn't you therefore include typos and spelling mistakes?   What would you miss if you did not include accidental spelling variants?   How would you know what they were?

In Cinahl, yesterday: 

Cinahl - 48999 results

Cinhal - 664

Cinalh (not thought of that one before) - 34

In Ovid Medline, yesterday: 

Cinahl.ti,ab. - 36010

Cinhal.ti,ab. - 1069

Cinalh.ti,ab. - 46

What about caesarean?   Cinahl seemed to search caesarean when I searched for caesarian, finding the same number of results, so I looked just at Ovid Medline:

Ovid MEDLINE(R) ALL <1946 to February 03, 2022>

1 caesarean.ti,ab. 23038

2 cesarean.ti,ab. 44059

3 caeserean.ti,ab. 32

4 ceserean.ti,ab. 7

5 caesarian.ti,ab. 1436

6 cesarian.ti,ab. 474

7 caeserian.ti,ab. 12

8 ceserian.ti. 0 (I think when I did this yesterday there was one)

There may well be others.   To help find them all, I tried wildcards.  In Ovid: 

? stands for one character or none, and can be used in the middle of a word or at the end.

# stands for one character in the middle or at the end.

* stands for any number of characters at the end, as does $, and both can be qualified with a number, so *3 or $3 would find the word stem followed by up to three characters.

c#?s#r#an.ti,ab. finds 67579.

or/1-8 finds 67506, which means that term with wildcards finds an additional 73.   Some I can't explain, some are personal names like Cesarman and others are the Spanish word conservan.  

But I can see ceasarean, cessarian and casarean.  

We could truncate our wildcarded term, c#?s#r#an*.ti,ab., which finds 68360.

I think too much detail for most of my sessions, but worth a mention to anyone doing a systematic review.   

Oh yes, and then on the same day courtesy of Improbable Research, @improbresearch, brian injury.  A few other examples of this and brian damage, in Medline...  This one is just a typo, I am sure, not a word like caesarean whose spelling is difficult.