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I imported many pdf articles into Mendeley but saw that Mendeley did not capture all the fields correctly. So, I needed to change them manually. It would be a tedious job to do so with many documents. Fortunately, many of the documents share common journal names and years. So, I needed a way to edit them together.

Is there a reference manager where we can edit selected references in one go without having to do this for each reference individually?

I have tried Endnote. Mendeley, and JabRef so far but could not find such a way. I will be grateful if someone has any idea/experience in this direction.

Edit-1:
After solving the batch editing problem, I also had a problem with getting the syntax for the authors correct.

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    Maybe you could actually put the edit part into a question, answer it and accept it? I think it's a valid question, and it would be nice for the future persons who will look for it to see that there is an answer :) – user102 Jun 29 '12 at 14:31
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    Thanks @CharlesMorisset. This question taught me more thing than I could imagine. I realize the value of SE where you can get questions and answers either not found or hidden in guides and manuals – Stat-R Jun 29 '12 at 14:40
  • Yep, that's exactly the point: not only answer to one particular question, but also building a base of interesting and good questions/answers, to help the future generations and build a better world! :) – user102 Jun 29 '12 at 15:05
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Mendeley does it actually. I did not try properly before. enter image description here Then I had a problem with getting the authors correct. What you need to do is put them as follows

Last Name, First Names
Last Name, First Names

and so on.

After Edit-1:
Another useful thing in Mendeley is that, you just have to select the authors from the pdf and Mendeley will give suggestions on the syntax based on existing authors in the current database. See the following image. enter image description here

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If you use bibtex, then you can batch edit with things like sed, awk, or simple find/replace in any text editor.

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In my experience, the author syntax changes if you're using DOI or PMID. In addition to the method that @Stat-R suggests, if you filter by authors, you can simply drag and drop author names onto each other and they will merge into your designated syntax.

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