Enter ref as in-press, then later update with downloaded full citation info, retaining same RefID number

Reference Manager Reference Manager How To
1

hello all,

I am looking for a solution to an issue and not sure if RefMan has the right capability.  We are a small marine research funding institution; we maintain a publication number database for all of the publications stemming from our grants.  So far its been done manually.  Now I’d like to use RefMan to automate part of the process, using the RefID field as a means to ensure and designate sequential, unique publication numbers. 

First step would be to import all the existing records (ca. 240); that is no problem.  The question is about new records.  We initially get notification from authors at the in-press stage; we could manually create a new record with first author name and draft title; and we could reply to the author with the RefID number for that record as the publication number. 

But then, several months later, after the paper is published, is it possible to return to that record and overwrite the place-holder data with full citation information downloaded from an online source?  I know that I could do it manually-  simply cutting and pasting--  but to reduce the number of steps and to ensure accurate, full info, I want to know if it’s possible to ask RefMan to import citation information to a targeted record number, overwriting whatever data is already in that record.

I apologise in advance if this is an easy question; I am not a RefMan user currently so may be missing something basic.  I did search through the manual to try to find an answer but was not successful.  THis seems like it may be a common workflow, if others are using RefMan as a way to track publication numbers?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

2

Hello Tivp,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner on this.

Currently, imported information can only create New references in Reference Manager.

The Import function cannot update or replace existing references (yet).

Though, this may change in a future version.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thanks,

Steve

3

Hi

If I understand you correctly, I have a similar problem with my own in press records.

In order to get around this problem I do the following:

1-Create manually preliminary record “in press”

2-When the citation information is finally available, download it.

3-Delete the preliminary record, but keep the number in mind!

4-Give the same number to the downloaded record.

In order to do this, in the tools Tools/Options/Reference Edit window, you should have the Assign Reference ID box unchecked and preferably use the option Reference ID Assignment Mode: Authors, primary + Date, primary.

Hope this is helpful.

Best regards

Luis C. Duarte

1 Like
4

Another way to do this would be to download the ref as above, then copy it using ctrl-c, then open the original reference and use ctrl-v to past the new version over the old one.

However, this won’t preserve anything you’ve put in to the rest of the reference, which you might want to keep.

Another possibility is to download the reference as above, then use edit - copy field to copy the new fields to the (previously marked) old reference on your database