CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vbams-word
paulm
paulm

Reputation: 107

How to find in-text citations

I work with very large documents that contain manually added citations. One of my tasks is to check if all the citations have been included in the bibliography at the end of the document. These in-text citations come in the following format:

  1. (Tom et al. 2001)
  2. (Dick and Harry 2007)
  3. (Jack et al. 2009; Jill et al. 2011).

I tried to write a macro that searches my document for text in the above listed formats and then lists them in a new Word document. I'd like to apply this macro to the currently selected text instead of the whole document.

I have written a regular expression search string to use in the macro:

\(*[0-9]{4}\)

But given the test string:

The (ABC) fox jumps over the dog (Tom et al. 2001).

I get a result of:

(ABC) fox jumps over the dog (Tom et al. 2001)

I would like to get "Tom et al. 2001" or "(Tom et al. 2001)".

Can improve my search string or approach be improved?

My entire macro is as follows:

Sub ExtractRefsFromSelection()
    MsgBox ("This macro extracts references from selected text.")
    Dim SearchRange As Range, DestinationDoc$, SourceDoc$
    DestinationDoc$ = "Refs.doc"
    SourceDoc$ = ActiveDocument.Name
    Documents.Add DocumentType:=wdNewBlankDocument
    ActiveDocument.SaveAs DestinationDoc$, wdFormatDocument
    Documents(SourceDoc$).Activate
    Set SearchRange = ActiveDocument.Range
    With SearchRange.Find
        .ClearFormatting
        .Text = "\(*[0-9]{4}\)"
        .Replacement.Text = ""
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindStop
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchWildcards = True
        While .Execute
            Documents(DestinationDoc$).Range.Text = Documents(DestinationDoc$).Range.Text + SearchRange.Text
        Wend
    End With
End Sub

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1271

Answers (1)

macropod
macropod

Reputation: 13515

Change:

.Text = "\(*[0-9]{4}\)"

to:

.Text = "\([!\)]@[0-9]{4}\)"

Upvotes: 1

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