My PhD thesis is made up of 8 Chapter plus Appendices. It is nearly 600 pages long and includes approximately 600 references in total. Each chapter was developed using Word (Mac) as an individual document with its own Endnote bibliography. I then combined the chapters, formatted the document as a whole (style guide, contents page, headers and footers etc). Finally, I converted it to a PDF for submission.
I now have a few minor corrections to address before my degree is conferred.
I need to add a paragraph with some new references to Chapter 1 and a couple of sentences with new references to Chapter 8.
Can I make these changes somehow using the whole formatted document? If I add the references it doesn’t just alter the references for that chapter (despite section breaks being in place)?
I really don’t want to have to go back and work with the individual chapters and then have to spend time re-formatting the whole document.
You can make changes as needed using the entire document but the effect will depend on whether you are using an Author-Date output style or a Numbered output style.
Using Author-Date will just involve inserting citations and additional text which in turn will update the bibliography. On the other hand, using a numbered output style will cause a rippling effect throughout the entire thesis by changing the number sequence of each citation which will also be reflected in the bibliography.
Also, regardless whether you are using an Author-Date or Numbered output style, inserting additional citations and text will impact the pagination of your entire document regardless of the section breaks, particularly if the added citations/text exceeds page length and spills over to another page. (unless your current section breaks have sufficient blank space to accommodate insertion of the new text and citations within chapters 1 and 2). This, in turn, will cause page numbers to change for the entire document and necessitate updating the Table of Contents and appendices.
Also, due to the length of your document, make backup copies while working so in the event something unexpected happens at least you have a backup copy at hand.
My students do this all the time. As CG says, make a backup copy (always).
The final word document before PDFing is what you want to update. I would turn off CWYW before starting revisions, on such a big document until you are ready to complete, just to avoid the lag times that may occur with a document of this size.
Once you have your new text inserted “update the citations and bibliograph” from the Endnote tool ribbon, then remember to update any other fields, including Tables of contents, Table of figures and Table of tables, so pagination changes are reflected, and you should be good to go.
I know it is big, but Priv Message me and maybe I can look at the document on a google drive - it sounds like the last chapter may have been corrupted in some way so that the Endnote references codes are surrounding the Chapter 8 content. Instead of turning off CWYW, can you turn on Show fields in Word and look at the begging of that chapter? Also, do you have any additional section breaks in your document (for landscape pages, for example). But the easiest way is for me to look at it and play with it. (Tech support should be able to do it too, but I probably have more experience with corruptions, etc than they do!).