I have two lengthy lists of article titles from Scopus and Medline databases, and I need to figure out which titles from list A don't show up in list B. Manually checking each title is a real drag, and I've already tried various AI tools but they all gave different answers. Now I've cleaned up the lists: I have two plain text files with just the titles in rows, and an Excel file with the titles organized in separate rows. One other thing to note is that the titles are in different orders in each list, which complicates things.
5 Answers
If you're using Excel, you can leverage the VLOOKUP function to compare the two lists side by side. It's a straightforward way to find out which titles are missing from one list.
An easy fix would be exporting the unique DOI identifiers for your articles. This way, you wouldn't have to match titles at all and could directly compare the DOIs instead.
For those more into coding, you can do this with command-line tools. Both Bash and PowerShell have built-in commands for comparisons. On UNIX systems, `sort` and `comm` commands can be really useful if you're comfortable with that type of approach.
You could use a website like comparetwolists.com to check your lists automatically. Just make sure to format them in plain text with one title per line.
I tried that site, but it didn't work for me either. It said all the titles were unique, which isn't the case.
You might also consider exporting your lists as CSV files, then importing them into Excel. You can use functions like UNIQUE to filter out titles or conditional formatting to highlight duplicates. It can streamline the process a bit!
Or you could just highlight duplicates using conditional formatting, that's a quick fix too!
That’s a solid idea! I'll look into exporting the DOIs.