Automation (software development) always faces the questions: Is it worth investing the time? How much would be the time saving effects?
I would say re-importing 130 references from Pubmed would take 2-3 hours. I’ve done similar things before, where most of the papers had at least 4 authors, and they hit just a single article for each reference when full list of authors (in Smith A format) are entered into search box in Pubmed. Another method is to add one or more keyword after the author list to reduce hits. It was so rare to have exactly the same author lists. Problem was a single author paper, which is usually review papers, and hit sometimes 20-30s. Even so, I could pick up the one I want readily because I know published year and journal as well. When I had a single authored paper, I also added one or two words from the title, and then I hit very few numbers. Alternatively, as Leanne suggested, use keywords that may hit many of your references, and import them all at once.
As compared to this relatively simple repetitive task, trying to learn external tools or re-tagging author/title/journal in bibliography may take longer hours. After all, the conversion may not be really guaranteed due to the errors of hand typing. So, you need to check each reference anyway whether they match with the data in Pubmed or not. As other “experts” say, there are no built-in function in Endnote that automates the article-by-article comparison with Pubmed data (unfortunate for you). Endnote is a tool to format bibliography, but not a tool to “reverse format” the bibliography. But, once again, it is up to you which path you take.
The real problem that lies ahead is the in-text citation edits. I don’t know there is a good way to convert “numbered” in-text citation, because search and replace function may not work for something like [1-3, 7-10, 13]. Searching reference 2, 8, and 9 will be completely missed in this case. “Author/Year” in-text citation may be easier, but it doesn’t seem like you have that format. I don’t know cb2bib or Hubmed can automate this process or not, but I doubt it. I think this process (in-text citation edit) is really need to be done manually. (For this part, refer to Leanne’s idea above).
Another question I have is, Are you planning to publish this document with different bibliography format? Why bother using Endnote if it is aready formatted correctly in JAMA style? That question will determine where you put your emphasis on.
Best regards,
Message Edited by myoshigi on 11-11-2008 12:46 PM
Message Edited by myoshigi on 11-11-2008 01:27 PM