Safely deleting a reference (without affecting references).

Question

I am currently working on a project (thesis) with many references, and as I wrote I sometimes entered the same reference twice, and sometimes I used cross references (as I needed to cite the same source at multiple places).

Now is the time to clean all of that up, and I'm afraid I will encounter some kind of problem. Since I have the same reference entered multiple times, I was going to do a search (ctrl F) of each reference, then, when I find duplicates, assign them a cross reference of the first one and delete them (and making sure that the original reference is on top of the others).

Since some of these references are crossed, if I delete a duplicate, if there was any cross reference referring to it, I'm going to lose some information. My question is: I know how to find the original reference a cross reference is referring to (ctrl click), but is there a way to do the opposite (see if a reference is used in a cross reference)?

Thank you all in advance, this will be of great help!

Answer 1

Check these:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/some-cross-references-to-figures-duplicate-figures/91f7ba5d-582f-4a13-82de-5bc47311e591

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/delete-cross-reference/009d953f-de5e-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/deleting-cross-reference-fields/01c55821-d15f-4621-8c53-ab6b8fd24408