Can't create a citation or a travelling library

I wrote a paper using CWYW (EndNote X) in Office XP. I then sent it to a colleague who made some changes to the text, citations, styles, etc. I believe he use a Mac but I don’t know the versions of EndNote or Word.

When he sent it back, I tried to add another reference, but all it does is add the in-text citation (e.g., {Smith, 2001 #686}). It doesn’t even add it as a field, it’s just plain text.

In an attempt to figure out the problem, I tried to export the contents of the paper to a traveling library. I figured it might help to add the new reference to the traveling library, then cite from there. The new library consists of about half of the references in the paper. It didn’t export any of the references that my colleague had added. All I got were the ones I put in there myself. Choosing “format bibliography” removes all of the references he added also, but DOES convert the in-text citation to a proper reference.

Does anyone know what could be going wrong?

Thanks.

It is essential to know what version of Word and Endnote your colleague used.  My recommendation (hindsight being 20/20) is that you always share an unformatted citation (curly bracketed) version.  

I suspect that CWYW has been turned off, which is why you inserted the curly bracketed endnote citation, nothing happened.  You can see if this is the case by clicking on Format Bibliography and then clicking on the “instant formatting” tab and see if the button says “enable” or “disable”. If “enable” then it isn’t on.  If you turn it on, inserted references should now format. 

Two, when two different versions of Endnote are used on a manuscript, there are a couple things that can happen.  One user may have the temporary citations set with square brackets and the other with curly.  Only one set might be picked up.  Often the whole thing can be fixed by selecting all, and unformating the endnote citations. If some are curly and some square do a search and replace. Of course,  their citations will no longer be available in the “traveling library” and you may need to get their library or download the references into your library. It sounds like they weren’t in the traveling library anyway for some reason. (were they using pre-Endnote 8?)  (AND when you do manually unformat all the references, this turns off the instant formating and you have to turn it on again!)  

There are many other tricks I use when sharing a manuscript with a colleague.  I save an extra copy and unlink (not unformat) the endnote references (select them and shift control F9), and then copy them into the a copy of the unformatted manuscript.  This way, my collaborator can see what refs I have included.  I have a style, that includes the record number so they can see which ref is which. 

Let us know how it goes. 

Message Edited by Leanne on 05-09-2008 02:32 PM

I haven’t been able to get in touch with him to ask about version numbers, but here’s what I’ve figured out. My document apparently can’t handle consecutive citations. So, if I format the bibliography or try to export a traveling library, only the single citations get noticed. Anything else like “23,25” or “4-6” is ignored. The fields remain in the document, but the corresponding references are removed from the bibliography or are not put in the new library. If I unformat the document, all the single citations are converted to curly-bracket form, but consecutive ones don’t change.

Evidently, this is not a problem for him, as he was able to add the citation without a problem.

I will post more as I get more info… thoughts? 

Formatted Word documents created using EndNote 8-X on one platform can not be transferred to the other platform.  When you have a citation with large amounts of data, which happens if you have multiple references in a citation, the data is stored in a format that EndNote on the other platform can not read.

If both people do not have EndNote X1, you must use the “Tools > EndNote > Unformat Citations” command before sending the document to the other user.

This issue was discovered after the release of EndNote X.  EndNote X1 was designed to understand the different formatting cause by the two different platforms. 

I think we’re both hesitant to upgrade to X1 while we’re doing this, just to avoid another compatibility issue, but at least now it makes sense. We can just unformat and then reformat for now and that should be fine.

Thanks! 

I suspect that CWYW has been turned off, which is why you inserted the curly bracketed endnote citation, nothing happened. You can see if this is the case by clicking on Format Bibliography and then clicking on the “instant formatting” tab and see if the button says “enable” or “disable”. If “enable” then it isn’t on. If you turn it on, inserted references should now format. It sounds like they weren’t in the traveling library anyway for some reason. (were they using pre-Endnote 8?) (AND when you do manually unformat all the references, this turns off the instant formating and you have to turn it on again!)