I got a question from a student worker who is doing a project with a faculty member's RefWorks account. The faculty member wants all the records to contain both a full periodical title and an abbreviated periodical title, since she switches between bibliographic styles that use one or the other. The student was wondering if there was a way to find RefWorks records that had one of these fields blank without going through the records one by one, since there are over 3000 records in the faculty member's account.
Hmm, said I. I couldn't figure out a way to search for records in which a certain field had no data. However, Lisa and I put our heads together and figured out that you can sort a list by both of those fields (periodical, full and periodical, abbrev) and if the field you're sorting by in a record is blank, it will appear at the top of the list, before the alphabetical order kicks in. Aha!
So, I recommended that the student view all references, sort by "periodical, abbrev", change the view to "full view" so that she could more quickly confirm that the field was missing, and edit the records that didn't have the field. Once she had added the abbreviation to all the records that didn't have it, she could repeat the process by sorting by "periodical, full" to make sure all the records had a full title.
This will probably be a little faster than going through the records one by one. If anyone else has a better idea, or questions, let me know!
Thanks,
Liz