Corrupt references in Word?

Hello
I am writing on behalf of a student who has a 300 page Word document with a large amount of references in them. Quite a few references are duplicating themselves - displaying as 2005a and 2005b - there is only ONE reference in the original EndNote library but if you do a “Find citation” search, it comes up with one correct and one corrupt (less complete fields) reference to choose from, e.g. #2 and #209

If you delete every reference and then insert them again it seems to have sorted most, but where is it finding these “duplicates” and is there a quicker fix please?

thank you in advance

Zoë

The quicker way is to unformat the document and then reformat.  I assume the “corrupt” refs were edited at a later time or redownloaded after a pre-publication version?  If they aren’t in the library any longer and are “stuck” in the travelling library, unformating the document references removes the travelling library and should either find the correct reference in your library (especially if you are using EndnoteX4) or ask you to find the correct reference. After this process, you should turn the CWYW back on from the third tab of the format bibliography dialog. 

1 Like

Not sure if this right etiquette to “re-open” message. Although this problem was solved for one student, there has been a subsequent problem for another student.

We perform the unformat citation to remove the traveling library (he is working on one large Word document with 2 associated EndNote libraries) which appears to work. However, on reformatting the bibliography - Word still identifies lots of duplicate references and asks you to “select matching reference” from a list of duplicates… We work through these manually and then Word crashes (one time it lost the EndNote plugin which we had to reinstall) and creates a repaired file.

Is the problem due to there being 2 EndNote libraries (one for books and one for  journal articles) or is it something else?

Any advice welcome

thanks

Zoë

Well, “reopenning” won’t mark it unsolved, so it might get overlooked for a response.  Better to start a new thread and point to the solved one, as not fixing the problem. 

Please also tell what version of word and endnote and operating system and version. 

Are the choices true duplicates?  If so, and can you tell where they originate from?  Did you also delete the bibliography during the unformatting step?  - and maybe run save it and reopen it, to ensure the travelling library is truly gone?

It sounds like there is a corruption if it is crashing word.  After unformating, select all and ctrl+6 or ctrl+shift+F9 to remove any residual hidden codes.  then reformat.

finally if it continues to be a problem call tech support and tell them what you already tried. Two libraries shouldn’t cause the problem, although I have seen a problem if the two libraries are partially exact duplicates. Say one library was copied and then two different sets of additional references were added, so the exact same record number in one library matched that of the same record number in the another library. 

Thank you. Had not saved and reopened. Duplicates look identical - when you say which source, do you mean which library or the origin of the reference (e.g. database/ Google Scholar etc)?

Will try as suggested. It is Endnote X2 and Word 2007 btw.

thanks for your support

Zoë

I think in EnX2, if you select the ref in the “choose matching” dialog, it shows at the bottom “status line” where that ref comes from (library name or traveling library, for example) .  (In X4 it is a detail in the edit citations dialog.)