This is my first time using Endnote. I am revising a book for a new edition. The book already has a bibliography of about 300 items, typed in the old fashioned way (in Word 2003), most of which will still be included in the new edition. It would not be worth the time to turn them all into Endnote citations. For the new edition, can I insert Endnote references where needed into the old-style reference list? Or will the system somehow get all confused if I have endnote and not-endnote references on the same page. I haven’t a clue how this all works…
Well that all depends. What style does the book use for references? If numbered, it obviously isn’t going to cope.
If Author, Year, and the Bibliography is Alphabetical, Endnote will start creating a new bibliography and it won’t insert them alphabetically into the existing reference list. But you can edit your book, and add the new references, and at the end, remove the field codes and then alpha sort the bibliography. You will need to inspect it for duplicates, where you insert a reference in a new part of the text, which already was referenced in the old part.
The real danger is that you delete text referring to an existing reference, and it isn’t used elsewhere. If you went to the trouble of inserting the endnote citations, you wouldn’t retain references you no longer refer to, in the bibliography.
Thanks for your quick response! This makes sense to me!
I can see the virtue of changing old references to endnote references (so that, as you described, if I delete all text linked to a reference then the reference would also go away). But the book has far too many references that will carry over from the old edition to the new one for it to be worth my while.Far easier for me (and copy-editor) to delete any stray extra references after the fact.