Different behaviour with wildcards on PubMed using quotation marks or not In my understanding of wildcards I would assume that this search string (in title &amp; abstract fields) would give a result of 0.

telerobot*[tiab] NOT *robot*[tiab]


But it doesn't. The result is 49. For me this means that there are 49 publications which won't be found when just searching for *robot*[tiab].

Does this make sense for someone?
Ah PubMed made to much automatism of it. This isn't the exact search string PubMed will proceed. Try it and see the Search Details on the right to find out what PubMed made out of it.

The solution is to put the words in quotation marks. Only in that case PubMed take them as they are without doing something out of your control.

"telerobot*"[tiab] NOT "*robot*"[tiab]