I'm having a formatting problem when I copy search strings from Google Sheets and paste them into databases. I'm not sure if anyone else has this same workflow, so it may not have come up for you. This is my typical searching workflow, and I've never had a problem with it before this year.
Here's the problem: I copy a search string from Google Sheets that looks like this:
"Native Americans" OR "American Indian" OR Indigenous OR "Native Tribes"
And then when I paste it into the search box in any EBSCO or ProQuest database (plus every other database I've tried), it looks like this:
"""Native Americans"" OR ""American Indian"" OR Indigenous OR ""Native Tribes"""
It has added an extra set of quotation marks around each term that already had quotation marks (and not the ones that didn't) and then an extra set of quotation marks around the whole thing. You can imagine how this messes up the search.
If I copy/paste the original into a Google doc or text editor, the extra quotation marks don't appear. My workaround has been to paste into a text editor first, but that's an added step that I'd just as soon avoid.
Is anyone else having this problem, and have you found any solutions?
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Sarah Dahlen
Reference and Instruction Librarian
California State University, Monterey Bay
She/Her/Hers
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