Exact Phrase Quick Search?

Hello, all -

I understand that the Quick Search does a word search by default (i.e. searches for any of the words in the search box), and that searching for an exact phrase requires placing the phrase in quotation marks.

However, this behavior seems a bit inconsistent:

- If I search the phrase without quotation marks, the search works as a word search, as expected, and only operates on the current collection, also as expected.
- If I search the phrase with quotation marks, the search works as a phrase search, as expected, but operates on my entire library, which is not at all as expected.

This anomalous differential behavior only seems to occur when searching "everything" (not when searching "Title, Creator, Year" or "All Fields and Tags") . In the no quotation marks search, Zotero searches "everything" in the collection; in the quotation marks phrase search, it searches "everything" in the entire library.

Any clarification on this behavior would be much appreciated.

(Using latest Zotero Mac beta on OS Catalina with all updates installed).

Best regards.
  • Hello, all -

    Any hope for a resolution to this (if it is indeed a bug)?
    It's still the behavior even in the current beta.

    Thank you... and happy new year!

  • It's even weirder than this: it doesn't just search across collections, it searches across libraries! I've got items from groups and my personal library (confirmed via ctrl) in the results of Everything + ""
    (I'll say this is a nice workaround to get search across libraries, so I'm kind of sad to see it go, but I agree that it is a bug)
  • @adamsmith Thank you for checking...hope this can be resolved.

    The only workaround I have found is to do an advanced search, choose the collection, etc. But that's clearly not ideal in terms of efficiency.
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