To Quote or Not To Quote…that is the Struggle

To the average person’s eye quotation marks all look the same, however there are actually two distinct styles of quotation marks: straight and curly (also known as “smart”). The difference is simple, but easily missed.

So what’s the Difference?

Straight quotation marks are single or double vertical lines that frame a word or phrase.

'Straight' or "Straight"

Whereas curly quotation marks are single or double curved lines that change direction depending on if they are framing the beginning or end of the word or phrase. 

‘Curly’ or “Curly”

Visually both of these types of quotation marks function the same way, they signify the beginning and end of a quotation, passage, or phrase. But many publishers prefer curly (also referred to as smart) quotations as they are more pronounced to differentiate the start and end of a passage of text. 

Today, most word processors (i.e. Microsoft Word), automatically change straight quotations to smart quotations as you type. While this automatic feature is meant to make text more legible and in line with publishing standards, when it comes to conducting searches in databases it came make things complicated.

This is especially the case if you are copying and pasting a search strategy from Microsoft Word (or other word processing software), directly into a database. If quotations are automatically changed to curly quotes, it can cause issues with search strategies.

How Literature Databases View Curly (Smart) Quotations

Scholarly databases respond to these curly quotations in one of three ways.

• The search results are identical whether straight or curly quotations were used
• The search results varied depending on whether straight or curly quotations were used
• The search strategy is rejected (error message) due to unsupported characters

This issue can greatly impact searching biomedical literature since curly (smart) quotes are unsupported on the Ovid platform.

Ovid hosts the following biomedical databases:

• MEDLINE
• PsycINFO
• AMED
• JBI
• Embase (for some institutions, not MSK)

IMPORTANT: If curly quotes are put into an Ovid database an error message will be returned.

For more information about literature database platforms and how the respond to quotations:

Phrasing in Reproducible Search Methodology: The Consequences of Straight and Curly Quotation Marks

Barrick, K., & Riegelman, A. 2021. College & Research Libraries, 82(7): 978 

 

How to Disable Smart Quotes in Microsoft Word

For: Word 365, Word 2021, Word 2019, and Word 2016

To err is human, and that includes when we search databases. And while there is always a possibility of typos and errors in searches, the chance of errors increases with the complexity and length of search strategy used.

Most databases, including Pubmed, have mechanisms of alerting a searcher of certain errors found within a search by providing “warnings”, but unfortunately not all typos cause a functional error, and in those instances the database will not provide a warning and the user may end up with unintended search results.

Functional Errors in PubMed

Functional errors in PubMed trigger a warning, as they impede in the function of the database to conduct the search as written.

Quoted phrase not found in phrase index

Not all phrases (string of words you enclose in double quotes) can be found in PubMed due to how PubMed indexes phrases. 

“progenitor cell transplantation”

The easiest solution to this error is remove the double quotes, however this can lead to unintended results if you are not careful. There are several things to keep in mind if you simply remove the quotation marks. 

• If you remove double quotes from a phrase not found, but are using a specific field code, the search would be broadened by implying that there are Boolean operator AND in between each word, but the field code prevents PubMed from automatically mapping.  

“progenitor cell transplantation”[tiab] → progenitor cell transplantation[tiab]

• If you remove double quotes from a phrase not found, but are not using any field codes at the end of your phrase, the automatic translation by PubMed would become much broader than intended as it will add additional mapping to MeSH terms and word variations for each separate term.

“progenitor cell transplantation” → progenitor AND cell AND transplantation

PubMed recommends using proximity searching to fix this error. Proximity searching is a newer feature in PubMed that allows the user to control how close terms are to one another. In the example below it would only retrieve results in which all 3 terms were found within 3 words of one another.

“progenitor cell transplantation”[tiab:~3]

The last and most extreme solution to this functional error is to switch to a database that does not restrict phrase searching, such as Embase.

The asterisk in your search was ignored

If you are using an asterisk as a wildcard (truncation) in a search strategy, you must use 4 or more characters.

The easiest way to fix this error is simply lengthen the root word to at least 4 characters to truncate and include all possible endings.

The following term(s) were ignored:

This error is usually caused by a typo where something in your search is unbalanced or unpaired, including parentheses, quotation marks, and duplicate boolean operators. 

If you are unable to quickly locate where the issue is, go to Advanced Search and click on the ! under details. This will expand out your entire search strategy and highlight where the error is located.

Common Search Typos

Since these are typos, they often do not trigger a warning within PubMed so it’s important to carefully check your search strategy to make sure everything is correct.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) must be fully capitalized. If they are not capitalized or only the first letter is capitalized, the search translates it as a term and not a Boolean operator, meaning Or would find the word Or in the record but would not OR together two terms. 

If a Boolean operator is omitted PubMed will automatically insert the AND operator. Since AND and OR produce significantly different results, an unintended AND where the search needs an OR would cause a serious alteration in the results, but since it is a legitimate search technique, there would be no warning from PubMed.

Scopus has updated their website and with it has added several new tools and resources aimed to provide additional support for researchers and authors.

Researcher Discovery

Scopus introduced it’s new Researcher Discovery tool to help researchers find and connect with leading researchers in their discipline as well as find collaborators for projects, all with simple keyword searching.

How to Use Researcher Discovery

1. To get started, click on Researcher Discovery, found on the Scopus main page menu bar
2. Enter the keywords to quickly find researchers in a particular field
3. Choose the criteria you want to use to sort your search results
4. Quickly refine results based publication date, country, or even organization
5. Preview Profile includes a synopsis of the authors information (including most recent affiliation and e-mail address, years of experience, and research topics)
6. Clicking on Full Profile allows you to explore an author’s full Scopus profile including metrics

Make Connections in Scopus!

Researcher Discovery is a vital tool for early and mid-career researchers that can increase their visibility, and support collaboration, network building, and career development; or for those researchers embarking into a new or emerging field to identify, connect, and build collaboration among researchers.

For more information, please see Scopus’s Researcher Discovery FAQ page.

Author Position Metric

Scopus just announced a new metric available within their Author Profile pages. This new Author Position metric is designed to help researchers better track and understand their research performance, including providing a comprehensive overview of their performance over time that can be used for promotion, tenure, and grant applications.

What is Author Position and how does it work?

Most research includes a number of contributing authors, and using traditional author metrics all co-authors are weighed equally when accounting for citation impact. This often over-inflates the contributions of some authors and minimizes the contributions of other authors.

With the new Author Position metric, Scopus now captures the following authorship positions, including:

• First author: The first author mentioned in the publication
• Last author: The last author mentioned in the publication
• Corresponding author: An author is marked as the corresponding author in the publication (since June 2020, all new documents in Scopus can contain multiple corresponding authors, prior published and indexed documents can only have one corresponding author)
• Co-author: Co-authors are any author that is not a first, last or corresponding author
• Single author: An author is the only author of a publication

How to Find Author Position Metrics

From the Author Profile page, find the Author Position preview in the lower right column. From there, select View Author Position Details to expand details on authorship position metrics.