Unsolved Mysteries: EBSCOhost auto-correct

This week's tip is another contribution from our colleague Sandy Campbell and her colleagues at the University of Alberta. Sandy writes:

I don't think I sent you this one. It is another CINAHL weirdness.

When I search Matis (which is the name of an Indigenous people), the first three results returned are "mates", but the 4th is MATIS.

That one isn't the right subject, but you can see that it has interpreted the term matis as mates, as well as matis.

It took me a while to figure out why when I was searching for South American Indigenous people, I got a paper on African rhinoscerous mates.

"Matis" brings up 98 results. That should be enough to return a unique search.

If you search Germa, it asks if you want to search Germa or Germany, but it doesn't do that with Matis

So in my South American search hedge, I've ended up putting quotes around every term, just to be sure.

Here are the numbers of  results returned by Sandy's search terms, with and without quotes:

In other words, EBSCOhost continues to auto-correct even when Smart Search is disabled. 

I tested this in another database, PsycINFO, with similar results:

This time, however, the results were even more perplexing - a couple of the results for "deni" in quotes retrieve abstracts with the word "denial":

Here's another recent example of this phenomenon. CINAHL/EBSCOhost users, have you encountered this in your own searching? Is there some rhyme or reason to the way the platform is processing these searches? These examples demonstrate that EBSCOhost, like Google Scholar, fails to meet the technical requirements for transparent and reproducibility in systematic searches.