December 08, 2008

Exporting data from RefWorks to Excel

I've had two questions recently at the desk about analyzing references by geographic location. I've managed to assist these patrons by helping them export data from RefWorks into Excel. Data can then be sorted and summarized in Excel. In each case, "Country of Publication" was the field we were interested in. State level data is also available, but requires manually identifying the state from each "Author Address" field. In my opinion, it is easier to do this in Excel, rather than pulling up each individual reference in a database.

I thought I'd pass this strategy along, in case it might be helpful for someone else. Also, if anyone has a better approach, I'd love to hear it!

Cheers,
Emily

Instructions for exporting data from RefWorks:

1. From the RefWorks toolbar, select Tools > Export References
2. Select folder to export
3. Select Tab Delimited format
4. Click Export to Text File
5. Click Download it to open the file in your browser
6. Your browser window should now be filled with text. Select File > Save Page As...
7. Change the file's extension to .xls and Save
8. Open the file using Excel
9. Sort and summarize as usual in Excel

Posted by biomedref at December 8, 2008 10:31 AM
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