Changing All Common Citations at Once

Hello,

Does anyone know how to change all common citations at once? One could also describe it as redirecting all citations to a particular reference to cite another reference. For example, if I have two citations that cite reference A and then want to change both of them at once to cite reference B, how would I accomplish this?

As of right now, I only know how to change them one at a time and this can be quite frustrating as the numbers update automatically so that I have to continuously search for different citation numbers as I work through all of the citations. I can probably start from the end of the document and work my way backward to save me some trouble from the automatic renumbering, but I still would have to change each one individually.

Thank you.
  • There is no easy way to do that. What's the exact use case?
  • edited March 11, 2013
    Use case:

    Some students (I know of those in nursing and social work) can only use references less than three or five years old. In addition, if an author has published a more recent article on the topic the student must use the new article if the substance is the same even if the first paper is within the time window. I've never been able to receive a satisfactory explanation for this arbitrary policy but is seems to be the rule in most nursing schools in the U.S. It is also commonplace for a student to be told to "use another reference instead" for one or more of those provided in the original submission.

    The way I recommend fixing this is for the student to 1) keep a version with live references and make another copy of the live reference electronic document file; 2) make a copy the reference links removed and print it; 3) identify the citations that must be changed by marking the printed draft; and 4) use the printed manuscript to locate the places where changes should be made in one of the versions of the most recent live-reference document. This editing with a safety-net can progress very rapidly.
  • the other suggestion (not necessarily mutually exclusive) would be to switch to an author-date style while doing the replacing. That way the updating of reference will present no (or at least very little) issues.
  • Thank you very much for your suggestions.

    The actual use case was that I had cited Wikipedia as a Web Page and then realized that there was also a way to cite it as an Encyclopedia and wanted to switch to that version. I had already made the changes by the time I posted, but wanted to see if there was an easier way that I could switch any citations in the future.

    (I know Wikipedia is not the best reference, but for the assignment I am working on I know my professor would not care.)

    A related question, given the US Nursing School policy would it be beneficial to put in a feature request to be able to swap references for Zotero?
  • that was actually why I asked - if you want to change the reference as in your WP case, you can just modify the item in Zotero (since this is actually the same item and you just want to cite it differently) and those changes will make it into the document.
  • That is true, changing the item type may have have worked; I had initially tried to merge the Web Page item (made with the "Create New Item from Current Page" button) with the Encyclopedia item generated from the URL bar button, but Zotero would not merge two different item types. Had I modified the Web Page item to an Encyclopedia item, I could have probably merged them and saved having to change each citation individually.

    Thank you, adamsmith.
  • Had I modified the Web Page item to an Encyclopedia item, I could have probably merged them and saved having to change each citation individually.
    yep, that would have worked.

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