Merging references

I have exactly the same problem. :cry:

I have 109 duplicate references after importing all my PDFs. My university databases are not available for online search, so all of these would be a manual reentry.

Please, PLEASE escalate “Merging References” to the top of the queue for updates.

Many Thanks.

Dr Matt

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One more vote for this feature!  It would be extremely useful.

Thanks!

NM

This would be great. Any word?

Jason Rollins seemed to indicate that it was on their to-do list. I wish there was a way users could vote for features to prioritize. For me, merging citations would be the single most useful productivity feature that is currently missing.

The way I’d envision this to work would be:

  1. Ctrl/Cmd-clicking citations to select/highlight

  2. Right-click and select merge citations.

There are ways to approach conflict resolution efficiently:

e.g. one could select and move citations up and down. Conflicts could optionally be resolved by overwriting top -> down or down -> up.

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Yes, he indicated this, but this was a year ago and still the feature is not integrated. So I have serious doubts that it will be available soon. To me, this is a must-have feature. Without it, I see no reason for me to buy a copy of Endnote.

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Hi Jason,

Any update and time scale about this feature ?

I cannot think about a more useful element than “merge references” for the next update of EndNotes… which could be followed by improving the way DOI are looked for and identified in a pdf file (which it-self could be complemented by extracting (at least) the title of a manuscript when the DOI is not found…).

The “merge references” feature seems to be expected by most customers and appears to be essential to convince new ones to purchase the software… maybe it is the time to wrap up and release this feature in the next update.

Best Wishes

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There is a simple reason for this. New users probably already use another program for managing references. But most of these programs do not allow the user to export reference data including pdfs. So after an export, you end up with all your pdfs on one end and a text file on the other. You only get all your references back if you import both the text file and the pdfs. But in that case, EndNote poses the problem that you have lots of duplicates (in my case several hundred). This makes changing the reference software extremly time consuming, especially if your library is very large. But time is a scarce ressource for researchers. So probably many researchers will stick to the software they already use although they know it is less powerful.

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Has there been any further development on this?

I am using X7 and it hasnt got the feature.

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amen.  Please allow the merging of two references.  – Ancestry.com even lets us merge two similar “ancestors” who should be one! 

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The same problem PLEASE ¡ it would be extremely helpful

Another desperate user¡¡

Joaquin

The same problem PLEASE ¡ it would be extremely helpful

Another desperate user¡¡

Joaquin

Any news about that? I think that it is a must now …

july 2017 using x8 on Mac… PLEASE… LET ME MERGE 

july 2017 using x8 on Mac… PLEASE… LET ME MERGE 

THIS IS OF CRITICAL IMPORTANCE.  Here is the scenario.  We import a pdf and it doesn’t get recognized with metadata.  Then we search the article in the web bar for pubmed and get the reference.  Now we have two references in our catalogue. We need to be able to highlight the incomplete ref that has the pdf, highlight the complete ref without the pdf, and click on a nonexsitent button called “Merge”  that drops the pdf into the completed reference, and deletes the pdf-containing incomplete reference from our library.  This is the one major missing feature in the software IMO.  

Amen! please give us the option to merge duplicates!

I agree. 

Here’s how _ I _ do it. (The hard way?)

  1. There is an option to “Find Duplicates” under the References Tab , about halfway down.

    However, unless there are enough fields filled in, the program doesn’t recognize that they are the same.

  1. You need to fill in several fields so that the references are similar enough for Endnote to react. 

  2. Once you have filled in several fields, the program asks which reference you want to keep. Essentially throwing out any fields that you haven’t copied over.

Note: I usually begin by selecting two similar files that I DON’T want, getting rid of one, then reselecting another two, etc. leaving the good one (the one with the PDF, in my case) for last…

Please, Clarivate , get your programmers to fix this issue. 

Here is my idea on how to perhaps do this easily:

Keep the Find Duplicates option; it can become the merge function. 

Synthesize a merging action within this function, so that when we have at least ( 3? 4?) a certain number of fields filled in that are similar,

  1. It recognizes duplicates

  2. It gives us the option of keeping the one we want, and merging in the information from the one that we have not kept. 

In addition, this option should see whether or not we have more than two similar files.

Currently, Endnote only recognizes two files at once, making it a bit more of a headache to sift through any extra files to see if they are necessary. 

There are a variety of competetive software applications out there. It is just a matter of time that Mendeley, Zotero, or one of the other catches up. 

Please update the software and make it even more worth our money. It is a good piece of software, but there are some issues that need to be fixed.

I agree with franktietze. Find reference updates usually does not work despite access to PubMed and Web of Science. It has never worked for me even though I had Author, Year and Title saved in the reference. The only times it worked was when DOI or accession number was manually added to the the reference.

I would also like to have a function for merging duplicates. Deleting the one of the duplicates seems to introduce problems in the reference list for the documents where the that same reference (with a different record number) has been used.

5 years later, this feature is still missing and needed.

I understand that prioritization is difficult to set and that not everybody can be happy about the result, but maybe a poll among users could be set… 5 years later, this feature is still needed then maybe it could go up on the priority list.

Fingers crossed…

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