After importing your data from another program, such as Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree, you will have to do cleanup, which is to be expected. In order know which citations have been worked and which are waiting to be worked, place a “1-” at the beginning of the Citation Name. Then after the Citation has been reviewed and cleaned up remove the “1-”. This way, it is easy to know what has and has not be cleaned and worked.
For example, a citation to be worked would be “1-P001-US1930VA-Henrico County, Brookland, ED 0002, Page 24B, FHL 2342181” and after it is worked “P001-US1930VA-Henrico County, Brookland, ED 0002, Page 24B, FHL 2342181”
This is a simple way of know what is remaining and what has been worked. The same can be used with the Sources as well.
Well I found my sources and citations highly undesirable when first moving from FTM (via GEDCOM) to RM. That said I decided to rebuild them from scratch using mostly TEMPLATE SOURCE (that I tweaked for my preference). That is not something most users would want to do.
There are ways via Search and Replace to fix some of that – and use of (SQL)Sqlite would be another option, Those options have some risk if you make mistakes – make sure you have multiple backups.
I don’t see how you can distinguish those that have yet to be worked on from those that have been done when the names are identical. Maybe I misread or you misspoke how you proceed with the renaming. You speak of choosing a citation to be worked on and prefixing it with “1-”. Now you have only one with that prefix out of many. Once finished, the only Citation with that prefix loses the prefix. Now what?
I’m a sample size of 1, but I tend to work this problem by people rather than by source and citation.
In my case, the cleanup is that I started by having a gazillion free form sources, many or most of which came into my RM database via unwise GEDCOM imports when I was starting out with genealogy 30 years ago. I’m gradually and manually converting all those sources and citations to sources and citations using templates. None of my free form source names start with the character * and I make all my sources names based on templates start with the character *. So it’s easy to tell them apart.
So I can make groups and do color coding and do searches based on the presence or absence of the * at the beginning of the source names. And in many cases, instead of fixing the sources I’m deleting the people because I really shouldn’t have imported them in the first place. And the approach of focusing on the people rather than sources and citations let’s me prioritize my work towards the more important people in my database rather than taking a more shotgun approach.
One advantage I have is that started putting the * at the front of new source names the same day that I started making all my new sources based on templates. Another advantage I have is that I can use SQLite. So I used SQLite to add a $ sign to the beginning of all the source names using free form templates. That makes them even easier to find. But I still prioritize and work primarily by people, not by sources and citations.