RefWorks Deduping
Greetings,
A few weeks back, a grad assistant in the IHI inquired about the ability of RefWorks to perform de-duplication of records. He was attempting to compare search results from PubMed and Web of Science, and was looking for a means of systematically (not manually) analyzing duplicate records to find the unique results of either database. We worked for quite a while on this, and while RefWorks does allow for de-duplication of records, it does so across one's entire database, not an individual folder, which is what we ultimately wanted. I contacted RefWorks about this and hear is what they had to say:
"The view duplicates only works for the entire database and not for
individual folders. This feature is planned in a future release perhaps as
early as this year. In the meantime what I would suggest is that you put
your PubMed results in one folder and your WOS results in another. You would
then view the one folder in one browser window or tab and the other folder
in a seperate browser window or tab. You might need to login to the same
account twice depending upon how your browser is setup. You can then compare
each folder using the full view. Just make sure that you are using the same
sort in both folders. You can also print out the contents of each folder
using the bibliography or print function and compare the results there."
~ David
Comments
Thanks for this! Another idea would be to set up another RefWorks account to just use for locating duplicates - export the folders in question to that account, and run the duplicate checker. You'd need to be careful about how you managed it from there, because if you then import the de-duped stuff back to the original RefWorks account, it assigns new RefIDs so that would mess things up if there was a pre-existing WNC document that used those references. But, you could either de-dupe before you write anything with the cites, or use the new RefWorks account to identify the dupes, then manually locate and delete from the original RefWorks account.
Liz
Posted by: Liz Fine | January 28, 2010 10:18 AM