Show entries in view only if other nodes with same term reference exist
After sifting through several modules, I decided that it's easiest to achieve this with theme pre-processing. Here is what I did:

I used the drupal 7 schema that I created years ago (http://upsitesweb.com/blog/2011/06/drupal-7-database-schema), to figure out which tables to join. The vocabulary I am using has the vid 14. I pre-processed the view and checked for each line, whether the corresponding node in the details content type exists, rewrite the view entries to only contain matched entries. 

It must be possible to also achieve the same with contributed modules. However, it was faster and more efficient to use views pre-rendering instead, especially, since other aspects of this view are getting pre-rendered anyway. 

function theme_views_pre_render(&amp;$view) {
   if ($view-&gt;name == "summary_details") { //filtering summary entries without detail
      $nids = array(); // array of nodes 
      $nodeswithdetails = array(); // manipulated results
      foreach($view-&gt;result as $key =&gt; $result) // check each node of the result array on it's nid
      {
        $nid = $result-&gt;nid;
        $return = theme_ensure_details($nid);
        if ($return == 1) {
           $nodeswithdetails[] = $view-&gt;result[$key];
        }
      }
      $view-&gt;result = $nodeswithdetails; 
   }
}

function theme_ensure_details($nid) {

   $results = db_query('SELECT s.nid AS sum_nid FROM {node} n, {node} s, '
                      .' {taxonomy_index} t, {taxonomy_index} t1, '
                      .' {taxonomy_term_data} td WHERE t.tid=t1.tid '
                      .' AND t.tid=td.tid AND td.vid=14 AND n.type=:dettype '
                      .' AND n.nid=t.nid and s.type=:sumtype AND s.nid=t1.nid '
                      .' AND s.nid= :nid',
         array(':nid' =&gt; $nid,':revtype' =&gt; 'details', ':reptype' =&gt; 'summary'));

    $found = 0;
    foreach ($results as $row) {
       if ($row-&gt;sum_nid == $nid) {
       $found= 1;
    }
  }
  return $found;
}