A bug causing lemmatization to not be disabled when quotations were used in the search query was identified on 20 July 2023 and resolved on 23 August 2023.
Between 20 July 2023 and 23 August 2023:
TS=(cat) matches [cat, cats]
TS=(“cat”) matches [cat, cats]
Resolution, since 23 August 2023:
TS=(cat) matches [cat, cats]
TS=(“cat”) matches [cat]
Technical cause
As part of a planned set of search improvements (supporting diacritics and special characters), changes were being made to a Web of Science component to support the new requirements. As soon as the issue was discovered by the Web of Science team a patch was released.
We advise all users running systematic searches using quotation marks during this period to re-run searches to ensure accuracy.