Editing citations to differing formats

EndNote EndNote How To
1

Hi there. I’m currently working on my Master’s thesis and have just started using Endnote X2 (working with the APA 5th output style). Up until now I have simply written citations and reference lists by hand.

What I’m having difficulty with is that I tend to want to use citations in a number of different ways; for instance:

“Jones (2004) found that dental anxiety was associated with higher frequency of carious surfaces”

“Dental anxiety is associated with higher frequency of carious surfaces (Jones, 2004)”

“Dental anxiety has often been found to be associated with higher frequency of carious surfaces (c.f. Jones, 2004)”

“Dental anxiety has been found to be associated with higher frequency of carious surfaces (Jones, 2004; although Smith, 2005, did not find a significant association in his study”

“In Jones’s 2004 study, dental anxiety was found to predict avoidance of dental care” 

If I always just wanted to use (Jones, 2004) or Jones (2004) I could do this quite easily using the citation template editor. But as you can see I sometimes want the citation inside of parentheses, sometimes outside parentheses, sometimes the year only inside parantheses, sometimes both inside parentheses with additional text before or after… etc etc etc! And there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to do this (the inside/outside parentheses thing being the main issue) - the edit citation tool is very rudimentary, only allowing deletion of author or year and addition of prefixes/suffixes - I can’t seem to use it to switch between (Jones, 2004) and Jones (2004) at all.

I’m interested in what methods others use to get their citations the way they want - a workarounds I’ve thought of would be to change the citation template to show only the first author’s last name, no parentheses, and type everything else manually myself. This is not ideal at all though.

I don’t really understand why Endnote doesn’t allow free editing of the citation within the edit citation tool - much in the way one can edit the display text for a hyperlink in Word to whatever you’d like it to be! 

2

Part of what you want can be obtain by using Edit Citation → Exclude Author → OK

If you want: Jones (2004) has claimed that …  , insert the reference and you will get “Jones (Jones 2004)”. Click on the reference and go to “Edit Citation” in the toolbar. Then choose “Exclude Author” and “OK”, and the result will be: “Jones (2004)”

Best wishes

Jan Ove 

3

Thanks Jan. This is a useful simple workaround.

The difficulties with this strategy, though, are that I still end up effectively typing citations manually (taking time); and that for works with 3-5 authors - most studies I cite! - I still have to manually keep track of which is the first instance (cite all authors) and subsequent instances (et al.). Keeping track of this automatically as I chop and change my thesis would be one of the key benefits of a good citation manager for me.

What I really want from Endnote is one or some combination of these options:

  1. Being able to set multiple citation templates for one output style, so that for an individual citation I can choose from a range of styles; or

  2. Being able to edit the citation template for an individual citation so that it displays as I want it to (but instant formatting will still update things like all authors listed vs et al. as the document changes); or

  3.  Having a range of sensible pre-formatted citation templates within each output style so that each time I insert a citation I can choose from, say: Jones et al. (2004) vs (Jones et al., 2004) vs Jones and colleagues (2004) vs A 2004 study by Jones et al; or

  4.  Being able to manually edit the display text of an individual citation without having to turn off instant formatting for the entire document (a la what you’d do with a hyperlink)

Does anyone know how any of these can be implemented with Endnote as it is? If not, these really don’t seem like particularly demanding programming requests - some good hacker at Endnote needs to get it sorted ;) 

4

I have ended up switching to Zotero, which allows me to directly edit the display text for a citation.