Tip #5: The Trouble with Curly Quotes

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UPDATE: Thanks to Layal Hneiny for the screenshots and instructions for Word (Office on the Web)!
 
 Have you ever run into the "unsupported characters" error message in Ovid MEDLINE?
 
 
In more complex searches, it can be especially frustrating to pinpoint the exact character that isn't supported. This is a simple search example to highlight one common situation that will trigger this error message: Curly or Smart Quotes.
At first glance, both of these phrases appear to be the same:

“drug addiction”.ti,ab. OR "Substance Use Disorder".ti,ab.

But upon closer inspection you can see that the quotation marks are slightly different:

The drug phrase has curly or smart quotes around it and the substance phrase has straight quotes. 
 
Ovid MEDLINE does not support the use of curly or smart quotes. 
 
This is a simplified version of a search that hit my inbox last week. I was working with a faculty member in a shared Google doc. She had downloaded the shared document as a Word doc to send to another colleague. Between the rounds of edits, a random set of smart quotes appeared in a very long search string. The faculty member reached out to me stumped by the error message. I immediately knew what had happened and did a Find in the Word document for curly quotes. While in the Find screen, I quickly swapped out the curly quotes for straight quotes using the Replace function. This quickly resolved the Ovid MEDLINE error.

To prevent this from happening or to efficiently replace them, you can do a few things depending on your preferred word processing software:
 
Google Docs:
  • From the Tools menu, select Preferences, then uncheck the "Use smart quotes" box.
  • You will still need to find and replace existing smart quotes.
 
Microsoft Word (Word for Mac 16.57):
  • From the Tools menu, select "AutoCorrect Options," then under the "AutoFormat As You Type" uncheck the "straight quotes" with "smart quotes"
  • You will still need to find and replace existing smart quotes
 

 Microsoft Word (Office on the Web):
  • From the File menu, click on "Options"
  • Click on "Proofing" from the left-side menu, then click the "AutoCorrect Options" button
  • Select "AutoFormat" and unclick 'Straight quotes with "Smart Quotes"


 
BBEdit:
  • From the Text menu, you can straighten all quotes in the document.

TextEdit:
  • From the Edit menu, select Substitutions > Smart Quotes 

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