Disappearing EndNote Libraries?

EndNote EndNote General
1

Hello!

Hoping to potentially find an answer here! I have a colleague (Mac user, EndNote X9) who had two libraries saved into a Desktop folder of his Mac. Both libraries spontenously disappeared. He searched for the names of the libraries in Finder, no luck. What’s strange is he has other libraries saved into this desktop folder, and is able to pull them up without a problem. We also were able to save a new EndNote library into this same folder and had no issue.

He also tried using his word plugin, and hasn’t been able to search for any citations using the plugin (it comes up as 0 results, even for authors currently in EndNote).

A few questions:

  • Any insights on the disappearing libraries? Has anyone else experienced this/any ideas on where the files could have gone?
  • Before the libraries disappeared, he had written a paper using the citations via the word plugin. The citations are still present as EndNote code (i.e. not plain text). Would there be a way to reverse engineer the citations back into EndNote?
  • Any ideas on why the Word plugin is acting up?

We will also be contacting EndNote support. I will post a solution if we find one!

Thanks in advance!

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No idea why they would disappear, but you can recover the citated records on a desktop version of endnoteX9 from the word document, Endnote ribbon, “export to Endnote” which will allow you to get the records back.  It probably doesn’t contain all the info and any attached PDFs but will give you enough to update them and find full text again.  It will only contain the records that were cited in the paper though.  

@wpaije wrote:

  •  
  • Before the libraries disappeared, he had written a paper using the citations via the word plugin. The citations are still present as EndNote code (i.e. not plain text). Would there be a way to reverse engineer the citations back into EndNote?
1 Like
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Thank you for instructions! This worked for those references (thanks again!). Still trying to figure out the mysterious disappearing libraries and the Word plugin issue. My colleague reached out to support and they were unable to figure it out, unfortunately!