Neither update citations nor unformat citations work in my Word document (Word for Mac; OS 13.3.1; Endnote 20.5). I have done this MANY times before . My Endnote library is open. The document hasn’t been saved in any other format. The citations still appear to be Endnote recognized, as they grey when selected. I get no error message - just nothing happens. Very frustrating as I have many citations and I need to add to them and then update them.
you may need to contact endnote support. but a couple things you can do to see if those fields are endnote fields.
Do your endnote preferences for temporary citations look like this ?“”
and the bibliography dropdown menu in word, look like this
meaning that the curly brackets are there and not some other parenthetical type?
Always on a copy of the document:
see what happens if you show field contents (alt f9 on a windows machine, not sure what it is on a mac). Do they begin with ADDIN EN.CITE and have parts of the record? (repeat alt f9 to get back to the reference themselves.) If not - then they have been corrupted somehow.
If they do show the above field info, and you have the library with the records, try convert citations to unformatted citations. Do they go to the curly braketed form (matching the temporary citation character you see in your preferences above)? {author, year #recno} or not?
Thanks so much for the reply, and sorry for the very long delay - I’ve been overseas and ended up having hardly any internet access.
Anyway, I checked everything you said, and it all looks OK. When I look at the field info for a citation, I guess it looks right - below I’ve pasted an example.
But, I can’t convert to unformatted or do anything. I tried inserting a new citation in, and it can be formatted and unformatted, but none of the existing one can be even though they seem to look OK.
Any ideas?
{ADDIN EN.CITE Wu20142485(Wu and Hao 2014)2485248517Wu, B.Hao, W.Horizontal transfer and gene conversion as an important driving force in shaping the landscape of mitochondrial intronsGenes, Genomes, GeneticsGenes, Genomes, Genetics605-61242014Austen (Computer - Group I Introns)}
The field gets a bit processed if I have the curly brackets - the text inside the curly brackets actually looks like this:
ADDIN EN.CITE Wu20142485(Wu and Hao 2014)2485248517Wu, B.Hao, W.Horizontal transfer and gene conversion as an important driving force in shaping the landscape of mitochondrial intronsGenes, Genomes, GeneticsGenes, Genomes, Genetics605-61242014Austen (Computer - Group I Introns)
Oh, no it doesn’t - even that gets converted. Anyway, its a bunch of text separated by < and > symbols.
what style are you using? Have you tried a different style?
Good thought - I’m using Molecular Biology Evol, but I tried all the styles in my list and no difference.
I noticed that if I click the “edit and manage citations” button it says the document doesn’t contain any editable citations.
Then I suspect they have been corrupted – do you have a previous version that has the fields intact and do a compare, keeping the old citations (preferably as temporary citations rather than fields) by rejecting the change and accepting all the others?
Thanks, yeah, I suppose I will have to try this. Many thanks for the suggestions and advice!