find reference updates

I suggested this tool in a previous edition, and like it very much. However, it is incompletely implemented. It should be possible to select multiple references at once and then choose either “fill empty fields” or “replace all fields.”

Thank you.

2 Likes

+1.  This would be really useful as a way to automate reference updating.  I have many hundreds (thousands?) of references that I imported from Reference Manager and some were not formatted properly (example incorrect font substitutions for authors with non-standard English characters in their names Greek letter or umlats).  It would be nice to do a batch update on the ones linked from Pubmed without having to manually choose “update” on every record.  I am happy to live with whatever the National Library of Medicine serves up!

This is especially important since the publishers tend to have references like Author: Smith, John, while Pubmed always does it as Author: Smith, J.  and the lack of proper fuzzy searching capability makes it more difficult than it needs to be to find all references by Mr. Smith!

  

yeah totally agree, it is very annoying that you have to click for every reference.

Also would like this feature.

YES.  I was looking for this conversation!  I have suggested the as a feature prior to x7, but it was not implemented.  I have thousands of references that need to be updated regularly.  I would like to just choose a subsset and have EndNote update them all without my input (like the facility to find full text).

Forgot to mention, in what circumstance would I ever want the PMID replaced with a WOS number!?  Yet if I go through find reference updates it will do this unless I alter the preferences.  This shoudl not be in there if Endnote is going to even pretend to make bibliographies that are compliant with the NIH policies.

+1 rather annoying…

I’ve also read your post but failed to finish the technical part. By the way, can this problem be solved now? Thanks!

It’s been more than a year now that these suggestions have been made on the multiple automatic references update, probably even before x6 … any patch?

I will add my vote in support of this feature – the user is right, and if he/she wants it then they should have it.

I agree wholeheartedly!!!  I would like to select about 1000 references and indicatte I only want to fill empty fields.  As it is I either need to delete information to geet that button “ungreyed” or wait to see a reference with an available button.This is extremely frustrating.  Especially since I have configured EndNote X8.1 to put grant info in the Translated Title field (Why isn’t there a grant field??) it puts it in one grant per line

Grant1

grant2

grant3

I then go in and use edit->find and replace-> choose the translated title field and insert a carriage return which gets replaced by ", " (without quotes)  resulting in

grant1, grant2, grant3

Then when I do a Find Reference Updates - they are all set back to one line per grant!

I expect Endnote to be much smarter in locating reference updates. If I can find refernces manually, than Endnote should be able to do so automatically. Minimally, Endonote should be able to find the complete reference when I provide a title, first author’s last name and publication year.

I can nearly always locate references by conducting a Google search on the title which will lead to a doi. Providing the doi to Endnote then retrieves the correct reference. Perhaps this can be scripted in Endnote.

Alternatively, Endnote could just index all dois with bibliographic information and eliminate all the complexity of searching databases entirely. I hate that online searches in Endnote rarely return anything useful. Computing power and storage is cheep enough these days to make such an index feasable.