Other than upgrading to a newer version of Endnote (its not an option), can anyone tell me how to merge duplicate references in my endnote library so that they are not deleted from my word document. I have a number of duplicates which are causing references to appear twice in my reference list. My thesis is over 400 pages long, and I can’t find all the duplicate citations in the document (unless someone can tell me an easy way to do that), and deleting one of the references in the endnote library will remove the citation in my thesis. Does that make sense?
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.
First check that the Edit Preferences, formatting options say to “merge duplicates in bibliography” If it does, than it is likely that the two references are not identical in your library.
Then the easiest thing to do, is delete the duplicate from the library (look carefully at the two and make sure the year and spelling of authors is correct in one or the other), then make a copy of your thesis and on the copy, “select all” in the word document and unformat and reformat the endnote citations/references in the whole thesis, and during the reformat, it will prompt you do provide the duplicate ref that is no longer in your library.
Thanks very much. I’ll give it a try. However, I now have another problem. I changed the details(author name) of a duplication in the hope that it would update in the word file and make the citation easier to identify. The details changed in the bibliography, but not in any of the citations (which makes me wonder if that particular reference is actually cited). As nothing happened, I deleted the reference from my endnote library. Unfortunately the bogus reference which I deleted still appears in the bibliography. To make matter worse, I changed to author name to a rude word which I knew was not in my thesis to make it easily identifiable, but now it wont go away … This could be very embarrassing… Hahaha!
Yes, that is the kind of thing that only unformatting and reformatting will reliably catch. Endnote, so people can collaborate and not have to share the whole library, includes enough information to match author, year and record number. Up to EndnoteX4, changing author or year, “breaks” the connection to the record number (to avoid accidentally quoting the wrong reference entirely, say in a different library with that record number) and relegates the citation and record information into the “traveling library” which persists in that paper. Unformating and reformatting will force endnote to look again for that record in the library and effectively “erases” the traveling library. This will prompt you for the correct or corrected reference. Alternatively you can “ignore” it during that process (particularly if the record no longer exists) then insert it into your library, and search for curly bracketed items and replace it.
After going thru the unformatting process, CWYW is turned off, so it is relatively easy to handle these - and once they are fixed, you may want to reenable CWYW from the third tab of the format bibliography endnote tool. By the way, EndnoteX4 is much better at letting one change critical information including the author and year. haven’t a clue how - but it seems to be rather clairvoyant in tracking a changed record with a citation in a manuscript.