Author (year) without (year)

EndNote EndNote Product Suggestions
1

One of the things that has really been frustrating me (and I’m yet to find a sufficient solution for) is inserting possessive citations in endnote (i.e. Smith’s (2005) model of bla bla bla). Adding the 's in manually results in it being removed everytime the citations are updated. 

The solution suggested on various forums is to simply insert the year excluding the author and then type the author manually. This alternative is really not sufficient though because it then

  1. opens you up to potential spelling mistakes
  2. adds the extra decision of whether to compact long lists of authors into et al. or not
  3. removes the ability to automatically update the citations if you edit the reference in endnote or change your referencing style
  4. just generally defeats one of the main purposes of endnote (automate citations).

For this reason, I think the ability to add the author but exclude the year and exclude any brackets around the author would be incredibly useful. This way you can simply insert Smith as a citation, add the 's and then add the year as a citation, resulting in Smith’s (2005)…

This also would be useful for when you wish to exclude the year from a citation. For example, if you cite an author in a paragraph, various citations methods then suggest you should exclude the year when citing that paper throughout the rest of that paragraph. 

It seems strange that we have the option to insert “author (year)”, “(author)”, “(year)” but no “author” option. Perhaps I’m missing something

This problem is annoying enough for me that I would switch to a different citation software however, it seems none of them offer this option either.

2

The reason no one offers it, it because it is a very rare construction.  I for one, have never seen it used in that way (mind you - I am not a developer nor work for TR or Endnote).  It used to be you had to do the hide/type workaround for Author (Year) and the automation of that is a relatively recent addition to Endnote’s toolbox.

I guess if I were writing, I would just say “The XYZ model of Smith (2005) proposes …” but I then rarely use a construct where the Author is mentioned by name in the sentence at all.  

3

in the edit styles menu:

citations-> templates

there are two entries “citation” and “citation - author (year)”

You can change these, but then would lose the valuable and more common citation formats. 

Look at the line under “citation - author (year)”

The APA 6th looks like this:

Author (|Year|, p.^pp. Cited Pages|)

change it to:

Author’s (|Year|, p.^pp. Cited Pages|)

DONT COPY THE ABOVE, SOME SPECIAL CHARACTERS DID NOT TRANSFER, EDIT IN ENDNOTE

This will make alll entries in the possessive by adding 's after the last author’s name… not sure how it will look on “et alli” entries, probably “et alli’s”

Also, it is replacing the nominative case… sooo if you wanted to type something like

“when Simon Schuster (1999) wrote that, ‘blah blah I have a PhD blah blah’”

You can’t :confused: It will come out as “when Simon Schuster’s (1999) wrote…”

you know what would fix this type of problem for good?

allowing users to add more entries to the citations templates.