Search and Move references between groups

Hi, I am trying to do something which would seem to be relatively straightforward, but doesn’t seem to be working correctly.

I have a group of references that I would like to sort based on Author. For example, I want to search for Smith, and MOVE all of the Smith references to a group called Smith (remove them from the original group and transfer them to the group called Smith). Then I want to do the same thing with Jones, etc.

The searching works fine, but when I try to move the references, weird things happen. For example, I can highlight (CTRL-A) all of the found references, then add them to the group Smith, works fine. But when I try to remove them (CTRL-D), they get removed from both groups and put into trash!

The previous procedure works fine when I select references manually in a group (all group showing, click on selected references, add to new group, remove from current group), but not after doing a search (only found references showing).

If I cut and paste after the search, the references go into both the new group and the trash.

Why isn’t there a straighforward MOVE command? There is ADD and COPY, but why not MOVE? You can MOVE to Trash, why not MOVE to another group?

Am I missing something here?

 I am a long time EndNote user. I am using EndNote X7.5 Bld 9325 on Windows 8.1.

I agree – it is almost impossible to do a search in a group to remove/move items from the group.  Any search (even if within a group) returns the results to apply to the whole library.  There is no way to select a portion of a group by searching and remove it or move it to another group that I can see.  It “copies” it to the other group but the original set is still in the original group, and no way to get it back (even though it is sort of slightly highlighted there).  I have struggled with this.  

The last time I created a new group, then combined the first group, minus the second group as a group set, then copied the new group set to a NEW group (found out the hard way if you delete the original group before this - the group set becomes empty) and then deleted the original group, the second intermediate group and the group set.  UGHHH.

Actually - it is possible. I thought I had the same problem, but if you move the references that turned up in your search into a new group, and then click back into the original group you searched in, you’ll see each of the references that were search results highlighted in light gray. If you right click the first one you see without left clicking, it will let you do “Remove references from Group”. It’s like all the references from your search were individually selected using Crtl+ … you just have to go back to the original group to make “Remove references from Group” an option.

Hope this helps!

Actually, what you want to do is possible:

After you do a search, move all those references to the new group you’ve already created. They’ll be showing up under search results, so you can’t “Remove references from Group” because you’re not really in a group.

Click back into the original group and you’ll see it jumps you to the first reference from your search results. It will be highlighted in light gray. The other ones are also still selected and highlighted in light gray, but probably further down in the list where you can’t see them.

If you just right click on that first reference, you can select “Remove references from Group” and it will do that for all the references from your search results. You just have to be in the original group they came from, not the search results window.