[collaboration] writing paper with coauthors who use Endnote as well

Dear Endnote expert,

As Endnote become more prevalent, this question becomes more important.

My colleague have a endnote library with same file name as the library I am working on.

I worked out the first draft (.docx) and send it to him, but when he open it he find all the citations are wrong. (Endnote used the record # in the draft to link to his library records!) 

May I ask how can I cope with problem?

Should I covert my draft to plain text before sending? or copy my library to him as well? (Does he need remove his library first?)

Is there any tips when collaberating with coauthors?

Thanks.

How were the endnote records inserted?  – it is highly unusual for a shared document to behave in the manner you described.  - the records should match author, year and record number.   The travelling library embedded in the document (assuming it was formatted) should not change.  I have never tried openning a paper on another computer with a non-identical, indentically named library, but it shouldn’t happen? 

If this is a bug, – Did your colleage try openning an empty library before openning your document, so the named library isn’t available?

  • or maybe just rename your library to add a letter to distinguish it from your colleages reformat and try again? 

but unless you have changed endnote, so it only inserts the record number by itself, without the author, year parts, it really sounds like something is unusual. 

what version of endnote and word? 

We have the same experience at our University. It happens when documents are opened in Word 2007 and then in 2010 (or the other way around). I contacted EndNote Support and asked what our staff and student should do when collaborating on a document.  The answer was a bit disappointing (if not alarming):

"… This is not a recommended way of working with EndNote. Traveling library will only keep the references intact until another version of EndNote tries to reformat the document. As in your instance, when student A sends a formatted document to another student B. When student B tries to open the document with their EndNote library open, the traveling library passes on control to their EndNote library. This means that the document is reformatted with information from B’s library.

The students will need to send along their EndNote library in order to avoid this. They can follow the instructions here to send a copy of the library: http://help.thomson.com/default.asp?portalid=tsc&refid=TS_ENDATABASEFAQ6

When student B tries to open the document, they will also need to make sure that the library which was received from A is open.

You could also advise the students to try turning OFF instant formatting and send documents which has citations in temporary format. …"

The Help-function in the EndNote-program says “… Because reference data is kept with each formatted citation, you can collaborate with other authors on a paper without each author having the same EndNote library. …”.

Hope EndNote X6 can handle this better than X5 (and X4).