Here’s a list of basic regular expressions/MS Word wildcard search strings, useful for academic copyediting. Use with caution. Only use Find/Replace All when you are really certain a string will not mess anything up. Track Changes should be turned off when using wildcards, as it sometimes transposes the Replace fields.
Replaces a bracketed year with a year preceded and followed by periods [(2000) to . 2000.]
\(([0-9]{4})\)
. \1.
The same, but with an index letter for the year ((2000a) to . 2000a.)
\(([0-9]{4}[abc])\)
. \1.
Replaces hyphen between two numbers with en-dash.
([0-9])-([0-9])
\1^=\2
Closing quotation mark, comma, or fullstop ordering from Oxford to Chicago style – note: does not find Smart Quotes.
(“)([,.])
\2\1
Same as previous, finding a smart quote
(”)([,.])
\2\1
Closing quotation mark, comma or fullstop from Chicago to Oxford style (not Smart Quotes)
([,.])(“)
\2\1
Replace smart single quotes with smart double quotes (be careful with this one in case there are apostrophes around).
‘(*)’
“\1”
Replace smart double quotes with smart single quotes
“(*)”
‘\1’
Change “Vol. #, No. #,” to “# (#):”
, Vol. ([0-9]{1,}), No. ([0-9]{1,}),
\1 (\2):
Author-date method; in text, change comma-separated author list to semicolon separated.
([0-9]{4}), ([! ]{1,} [0-9]{4})
\1; \2
Babel editing 
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