In RefWorks you can search for duplicate references in your account: Go to View and click Duplicates, then you can choose between Excact duplicates and Close duplicates.
By default, the most recent added reference is marked by RefWorks, so if you hit the delete button these references are deleted from your account. However, the most recent added reference is not necessarily the most complete reference, it might have an abstract that the older reference hasn’t, or it might have an attachment etc. So that’s not automatically the reference you want to delete!
There is a small solution for this: under Customize you find the option ‘Automatically Mark Duplicates’. By default that’s a Yes, but you can choose to change that into No. It means you have to mark the references you want to delete manually, but at least yóu choose what to delete.
Tags: Deduplicate references
November 22, 2011 at 9:42 am |
This feature can be of great help as the literature exploration may yield a number of duplicate references in one’s RW-database.
When already halfway writing a paper, removing duplicates by hand results in errors in Write-N-Cite during the generation of the bibliography when different alternatives of the same title have been used since they are then missing in the database.
You may need to check in your paper first, if the removal of duplicates by RW does not affect citations that you have already made… No?
November 22, 2011 at 12:14 pm |
You’re right – when you have entered a reference in your paper with Write-n-Cite and you later delete that reference from your RefWorks-account, you’ll get an errormessage in Write-n-Cite.
I think the easiest way to find out if there are duplicates in your paper is by creating a bibliography in Write-n-Cite: when a title appears in your bibliography more than once then that’s a duplicate. Then you have to check the Ref ID’s of those references and decide which one to use, which to replace in your paper and which to delete from your RefWorks-account.
In some cases (for example when there is little time left to finish the paper) it might be easier to delete the duplicates in your reference list at the end. But, be aware: in some styles a second reference to the same title looks differently then the first reference (for example et al. instead of all the authors). You have to check for this in your paper yourself: RefWorks treats references by their ID, not by their content.