A student grooming his library asked me yesterday whether there is a way to know if a reference has been used in a document. The reason being that he has a lot of references he suspects he doesn’t need, but he obviously doesn’t want to delete the references if they are linked to one or several documents.
Is there any way EndNote keeps a record of this? Either as a seperate record or per reference?
With EndNote X4 and later, there is an automatic group that gets created with contents of your document under the All References Group. If you open the document and library and use the “Update Citations and Bibliography” command from the EndNote tools in Word, the document auto-group will be generated with a listing of all the references used in your library for that document.
Yes, but it is a temporary group and only for the specific manuscript currently formatted. If you want you can move it to a group and then open another manuscript and moves those to the same group. It gets kinda complicated to identify those that aren’t in the group, when you are finished. It is also worth remembering that word documents formatted keep a copy of the records used, so even if you did delete it, it wouldn’t “lose” the info (the “traveling library”) but all in all, it is just safer to keep the records in your library rather than deleting them and possibly wanting them again later?