Can you use wildcards and truncation inside a phrase search on the Hub?

You can use wildcards and truncation inside a phrase on the Hub but it may not give you more results than a search without them. This behaviour is unchanged in the new EBSCO interfaces.

This Connect article explains how truncation can make your search more restricted as it prevents the search expansions that are applied in the Hub by default from working.

If you run your searches with the various expander options turned off the inclusion of a wildcard within a phrase will work as you expect. However if you use expanders this no longer applies - this is because the processing that would be involved in generating all of the different variants and all of the expanders against them across the multiple databases within EDS would slow the return of results to an intolerable level.

In the above worked example you can see S1 where there is no wild card the expanders work. A wider search results because it is able to manage to expand this single phrase. In S2 it can only do so to a limited extent. S3 and S4 show behaviour without the expanders with the wild card adding a small number of extra hits versus the basic term.

Generally the Hub is not the place for complex searching as it is trying to help you and this can unfortunately get in the way of trying to do more precise searching.