I have a large library where I am gradually adding research notes for each reference. I would like to create a smart group that lists all references where the field “research notes” is not empty. I’ve tried setting the pull down to “greater than” and leaving the search box empty, but the “create” button remains disabled. Is there some way to do this?
You can set the smart group to find out “Research Note is empty” by setting up the search box “Is” and empty box.
Unfortunately, smart group can not be set up to find out “Research Note is NOT empty” because smart group doesn’t have “omit from showing reference” option. But you can easily do so by the following steps.
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Go to the smart group which shows “Research Note is empty”. Ctrl+A to select all references and highlight them.
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From right pull down, “Show All References” which shows all the references, but the references of “Research Note is empty” are still highlighted.
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Right pull down again, “Hide Selected References”. This should leave all the references of “Research Note is NOT empty”.
Endnote should have “Is Not” search criterion, but for some reasons, “Is Not” seach has been done for years using “omit from showing” option.
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I would have to go through all these steps though every time I wanted to view all my research notes, though, right?
If you want to use smart group. But, you can set up “Research note is empty” and “omit from showing reference”, and save the search scheme. I would do that instead of smart group.
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This is not correct: "Unfortunately, smart group can not be set up to find out “Research Note is NOT empty”. It is possible to set up a Smart Group in EndNote X2 to find all the “Research Notes” fields that are NOT empty. Here is how to do this:
- “Record Number” field “Is greater than or equal to” “1”
- NOT “Research Notes” field “Is” - leave blank
Also, see the attached screen shot.
Jason Rollins, the EndNote team
Huh, I didn’t know that trick. Thank you, Jason.
I have been using the “Search = Is [Blank], Ctrl+A, Ctrl+M, Hide Selected References” method to isolate non-empty records. I would nevertheless very much prefer that the Search dialog contain an “Is Not Empty” option. This would make it possible for instance to search for records that contain information about a second or third edition and assign the results to a Smart Group; later on, it would be easy to go through these records directly, i.e., without having to resort to the cumbersome standard procedure to make changes (for instance to change Edition information from “2e” in French to “2nd” in English).
I guess I do this kind of thing, by displaying the field in my library view, and clicking on the top, to sort. Empty fields come to the top and I select them and perform the change text procedure. I find it alot easier than the more slick procedures.
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Leanne, you offered a very simple and working solution. Thanks for the idea.
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