  We compare the star surgery operations introduced in [KS] to the generalized
rational blow-down. We show that star surgery shares the properties that make
rational blow-down useful for constructions of small exotic symplectic
4-manifolds. Then we show that star surgery operations provide a strictly more
general class of operations by proving that there is an infinite family of star
surgeries which are inequivalent to any sequence of generalized symplectic
rational blow-downs. This answers a question posed to the author by Ozbagci. It
also demonstrates that the monodromy substitutions coming from star surgery
operations yield relations in planar mapping class monoids which cannot be
positively generated by the relations determined in [EMVHM11] which come from
the generalized rational blow-downs.

Geometric Topology;Symplectic Geometry