I recently had a MedRef question from someone who was cutting and pasting a search strategy from a Word document into Ovid. He was getting unexpected results, and eventually figured out that it had to do with Word auto-formatting quotation marks from "straight" quotes into "curly" quotes. I don't think I would have figured that out, so since he did I thought I'd share it with everyone!
Here is an example of a search query:
("Obesity and sex steroids during gonadotropin-releasing hormone" OR "Relationship between body mass index and prostate cancer screening" OR "Obesity is negatively associated with prostate-specific").ti.
The Word "AutoFormat as You Type" feature converts straight quotes into curly quotes and OVID didn't recognize the curly quotes. Once he turned off this AutoFormat feature in Word the search worked. To turn off the feature in Word, go to the Tools menu and choose "Auto Correct options." Click the "Auto-Format as you type" tab, and uncheck the "replace as you type... "straight quotes" with "smart quotes.""
Alternately, once the search query is pasted into Ovid, you can go manually change all the curly quotes to straight quotes. That will also make the query work correctly.
I had never run across this before, so just something to tuck into the back of your mind if you ever get questions from someone who may be cutting and pasting a search.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!
Liz
Posted by biomedref at February 12, 2007 04:20 PM