customizing bibliography format

I am preparing the bibliography for a manuscript being submitted to the journal Biochemistry. This was listed as an available format, but unforrtunately it is not correct in a number of respects. I’ve been trolling other journal formats to find something that meets the present requirements but to no avail. Is there some way I can customize a bibliography format? Thanks!

The power of endnote is not the >5000 styles  out there, (which as you say, are hard to sift thru to find what you need), but that you can edit an existing one to get what you need.  

Edit > Edit output style > edit “Biochemistry”.  From the style manager, you can also “preview” the formats for journal book and and book section examples too.  

– or look at the sticky thread in the EndNote Styles, Filters, and Connections and page thru the various “templates” that are available there, separately are the examples - but then you need to page up or down to find the templates themselves.  

Finally, you can request an update to match the publisher requirements, via their EndNote Request Form:

http://endnote.com/info/output-style-request

Thanks for your reply. I am an inexperienced EndNote user, running X5. I am a little confused by the following instruction:

Edit > Edit output style > edit “Biochemistry”.  From the style manager, you can also “preview” the formats for journal book and and book section examples too.  

What do I do after the command “edit Biochemistry”? Nothing happens on my screen and no new window appears. Is there suppopsed to be some way at that point to change the format template? Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying.

Perhaps this walk throughwill help you.   - It was one of the first I found after googling “edit output style”.

It looks like Biochemistry using a different reference format for Rapid Reports and for regular papers. Which are you looking for.  The only obvious difference  between the most recently available Biochemistry output style template, was that they want a trailing comma after the Author list in the bibliography, and not a full stop.

In Endnote, you can retrieve this Sep 2012 updated Biochemistry output style, by going to Endnote’s Help menu, selecting Web styles finder… Contains “Biochemistry”, looking for it in the list and downloading it, which will open it in Endnote.  Here you can make any changes you need (like changing the bibliography templates so a comma rather than a full stop follows the word “Author” in each of them,  and then “save as” (using the Endnote program) to a new name. Then in your word document, you need to change the output style template on the word ribbon to this newly named file.    

The Forums are still not allowing the attachment of endnote output styles, so I can’t attach the one I created.  

If you wanted the rapid report style, then you need to further edit the template to separate the authors with semi-colons rather than with commas in the Author lists part of the bibliography options.  Don’t forget to keep the trailing space… I didn’t look further for other changes… 

BTW, Biochemistry also have Word templates they suggest (or demand in the case of Rapid Reports) that you use.    

Thanks for the walk through. The problem with regular articles, which is what I’m submitting, is that it requires the full title, which is not part of the current Biochemistry style on EN.  Apparently, for Rapid Reports full titles are optional. But I have seen other styles, which have full titles, which are otherwise similar to Biochemistry except for things like punctuation. Perhaps I can edit one of these and same to a new filename as you suggest. I will try it. Will also check out the templates. Perhaps that is what Biochemistry assumes we are using, even though it’s not required. 

The September 2012 version I referred you to, has article titles?  Probably was updated since the version you have with X5, which was released in 2011?  Or are you talking about the Journal names which is a whole 'nother issue unrealted to the output style.  See this other thread for that solution.  

http://community.thomsonreuters.com/t5/EndNote-How-To/Journal-girl/m-p/44533#M9608

The current journal requirement is for full titles (of the articles) to be included. That, plus periods in journal name abbreviations, is the only thing I can see that is different from the current Biochemistry style on EN. I did purchase and download X7. But the Biochem style looks the same as it did in X5. 

Journal titles are dictated by the Journal terms list and the setting (which is currently 1st abbreviation) in the Biochemistry output style.  See the Journal Terms list thread for how endnote handles variations between Journal abbreviations etc.  

The Biochemistry on the web access  – it formats them as here (I don’t have an abreviation for J of Paleontology, so it wouldn’t abbreviate the example) which includes the title?   

  1. Morehouse, S. I., and Tung, R. S. (1993) Statistical evidence for early extinction of reptiles due to the K/T event, Journal of Paleontology 17, 198-209.
  2. Billoski, T. V. (1992) Introduction to Paleontology, 6th ed., Institutional Press, New York.
  3. Schwartz, M. T., and Billoski, T. V. (1990) Greenhouse hypothesis: effect on dinosaur extinction, In Extinction (Jones, B. T., and Lovecraft, N. V., Eds.), pp 175-189, Barnes and Ellis, New York.

Problem finally solved! Followed your walk through, which ultimately worked. The program had not been putting the Biochemistry.enl file in the right directory, which made me think at first that the protocol for editing a new style was not working. So I manually copied the enl file to the appropriate directory and then it worked. So now the titles of the articles appear in the bibliography. The problem with the journal abbreviations not being punctuated is apparently related to the origin of the citation. If it was taken from PubMed, as most of them are now, there is no such punctuation because Pub Med doesn’t use them. EndNote does not know which parts of the journal name are abbreviations, so they can’t be put in automatically. I am getting in touch with Biochemistry to see how other authors have dealt with this issue. But the original problem has been solved - the references are now in the updated Biochemistry format. Thanks so much for your help!

First there are two places that Endnote has styles saved.  One is the c:/program/endnote/styles folder which Windows protects and programs can’t write to. The other is the place Endnote saves the ones you download or edit and save as.  It makes no difference which folder they are in, as Endnote pulls from both places.  You shouldn’t have needed to copy it from one place to the other, but if you named them the same in both places,  Endnote would only pull it from one place, possibly the C: program folder, so it wouldn’t have changed, if an identically named file were in the user folder location.

Second.  As I have said before, perhaps not clearly enough, the way that Endnote handles the journal abbreviations is for the user to  import  the appropriate abbreviations table into each library.  This means it doesn’t matter what is in the record itself, as it will replace it with the contents of the correct column of the Journal Terms table.  The table will have the punctuation, and so the journal abbreviation will be correct.  

The instructions to do this are HERE:   www.endnote.com/kb/82228  with a nifty video walk thru.  

Remember I am just another user and not a TR employee…  

I guess I initially missed what you were saying earlier about the journal abbreviations. That will be great! I will look at the video walk through today. 

I know that you are a user and I’m really impressed with the knowledge of responders on this forum. Thanks for volunteering your time and expertise to do this!

The video walk through was very clear, and now I have been able to make the changes I need with the abbreviations. An ongoing problem Has been in how/where/if EN is saving the edited style (it wasn’t), but I changed the styles directory and now I can edit styles and save them. Not sure if this is what I was supposed to do or if it is a kluge but it does work now. 

Altering the location may be necessary if you computer were set up in a non-standard way, or if you had a pre X3 version of Endnote installed at one point which pointed to the Program folder location which became a problem after windows 2007 or so.  Glad it is sorted!  

Thanks for all your help, Leanne!