Find/ Replace Function
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!
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!
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.