How to make batch changes?

[Demogorgon]

Hello! How does one select a bunch of references and then make batch changes?

Last night, I wanted to set all the YEAR property for a bunch of refs to the same year, but could not do so easily. I tried to Find-and-Replace, but it looks like it will not accept a wildcard, so I had to enter each known wrong year in the FIND field about a dozen times. Surely there’s a method that simply force replaces the contents of a field with a string, but I can’t seem to find it. (And I’ve searched for “batch change” in this forum, but it’s all about PDF metadata.)

Now I’d like to find all refs that contain “Academia.edu” in their JOURNAL property, and then (a) delete this property and (b) set their PUBLISHER property to “Academia.edu.” I was going to use the Find-and-Replace dialog, but lo and behold—there is no JOURNAL property in the SEARCH popup.

I know there is some way to batch set properties easily, but I can’t find it!

[Demogorgon]

OK. I found out that Global Change > Change Field can do what I want.

I stupidly assumed that “Global Change” meant GLOBAL, but I see that it can mean “selections only."

But the Journal field is still missing from all pop-ups, application-wide.

[Demogorgon]

OK! I found out that “Journal" is just a wrapper for "Ser Title." I think I’m good now.

[Jon]

In addition to Global Change, you can perform some useful global operations in fields that have a Term List. For example, let's say you had references from the same journal, but the journal name had multiple variations:

PNAS
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Proc Natl Acad Sci USA
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA

You can instantly "harmonize" them using Windows -> Term List -> Journals. Select the first 4 (Shift- or Command-click) and drop them on the last one. All references in that journal will now have

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA

entered in the journal field.

Jon
Sonny Software