Find/ Replace Function

seantmitch
A replace function--in addition to the existing search tool--would be very useful. It would be especially good for those of us working with large non-English databases (I'm getting a lot of errors importing Portuguese diacritics, something that I know has been discussed here). Besides its many other virtues, a robust Find/Replace would allow for the pretty easy repair of the kinds of consistent errors that I have been getting while importing citations from Brazilian journals (and importing Portuguese entries from my own Endnote files). Thanks!
  • csaveanu
    I did some research to find the request for such a feature. Being able to do Search and Replace specifically on given fields would be extremely useful.

    For example, I cannot use Zotero in my work because the generated bibliography contains full journal titles instead of abbreviations. There were discussions about the implementation of a web-service or offline methods to replace full titles with abbreviations based on a correspondence table. However, if a search/replace function would exist for the 'journal title' field one could easily do the required replacements. Even better, one may imagine an extension of search and replace that would allow a correspondence table to be used in the search.

    Anyway, the modification of the search field to be able to limit search to given fields would be a first excellent addition to the already excellent Zotero. Next, having the replace option would be great and lastly, having a "batch" replace function or plugin would be sensational.

    A few months ago styles for the journals we write manuscripts for (PNAS, RNA, NAR) were not available. Now their installation and use is a breeze. Journal titles are however not correctly abbreviated but seeing the speed of improvement in Zotero, I'm confident I will be able to drop EndNote and Word and use Zotero and OpenOffice instead in the near future. Thank you!
  • asplundj
    It would be nice to be able to search for a specific journal name and replace the corresponding abbr journal
  • JM
    Ditto on find/replace. This would be very useful for cleaning up recurring mistakes across the database.
  • mark
    Ditto.

    See this related thread on cleaning up entries, where Dan Stillman mentions that "an author list view and batch editing are both planned."

    I would like to know for when this is planned, though. With a growing library, it becomes essential to have cleanup features like that.
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