Hello Adeel Rafiq, can't you just do a search for each reference & 1st author's surname, then scroll & if it is a duplicate delete manually 1 by 1?

it is tedious, but in fact if you consider before the age of computers, people used paper, so then it was more laborious / difficult in some ways but in fact technology while good, has created issues of too many publications

Duplicate references in a Microsoft Word document can be removed by using the "Compare Documents" feature, which allows you to compare two versions of a document and merge them into a single document.

Here are the steps to use this feature:

Create a copy of your original document by saving it under a different name.

Go to the "Review" tab and click on the "Compare" button.

Select "Compare" and then select the original document and the copied document you just saved.

Microsoft Word will compare the two documents and display any duplicate references in the copy in a separate section.

Review the duplicate references in the copy, and delete the ones you don't want to keep.

When you're done, click on the "Merge Documents" button to merge the two documents into one.

Thank you very much Fredrick Ishengoma

Alternatively, you can copy your references from the Word and paste in the Excel document. In the Excel you can select Conditional Formatting (from Styles), then select Highlight Cells Rules, then click on Duplicate Values. The duplicated text will start glowing. You can easily delete the repeated text.

After that just copy and paste your list into the Word.