Chicago Manual of Style - Multiple Personal Communication Records Issue

Hi,

Apologies if this has already been covered. I have looked around for answers, but you never know…

I’m currently organising the references for a paper using the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition output style (footnotes with no bibliography) along with CWYW (Endnote X7).

I have a number of ‘personal communication’ records for the same author in the same year, but these are being treated as the same in CWYW.

To illustrate, take these two records:

Jo Blogs, Letter to his mother, 19th September 2000.

Jo Blogs, Letter to his father, 10th April 2000

Now, when I cite the first record for the first time, it’ll come through as above. After that, any reference to that record should just be the author’s surname (i.e., “Blogs.”). All fine so far. 

However (and this is my issue), if I cite the second record after citing the first elsewhere in my endnotes, it will default to the short version straight away, even though it’s a completely different record. This means that none of the information for that record is actually captured in the endnotes and the reader will assume there is only one record.

It’s not just an issue with a single set of records either, as I’ve several such sets of communications from various authors and the same occurs with all of them.

If anyone can shed some light on a potential fix for this, I’d be very grateful!

Many thanks,

Adam

Hello Adam,

You can do the following to remove the duplicates from your library.

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-X3-and-later-Steps-to-remove-duplicates-from-your-EndNote-library?language=en_US

You can then turn off the setting for Cite While You Write to remove duplicates in the Bibliography.

On Windows go to Edit then Preferences or on a Mac go to the EndNote menu then Preferences.

Click on Formatting on the new window.

Unchechk Merge duplicates in bibliography.

On Windows click OK, on a Mac click Save and then close the window.

You can then go back to Word and use Update Citations and Bibliography.

If you need additional assistance.

Please contact Technical Support directly

1-800-336-4474 option 4 then 1

or

https://endnote.com/contact/

We are here to help whenever you run into issues.

Thank you, Tony!

I hadn’t realised that Endnote would only be using certain fields to identify duplicates. As I was using the ‘description’ field for personal communication records, it wasn’t seeing a difference. By adding a title, it solved the issue.

Thanks again,

Adam