Endnote exchanges citations

EndNote EndNote General
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Dear Community Members,

I hope this is the right place to put my major problem. In some of my Ph.D Thesis Chapters, Endnote substitutes citations from nearby footnotes. It is a bit hard to explain, I will try:

It should look like this:

[1] Maldives Faces Drinking Water Crisis, The Diplomat (5. Dezember 2014).

[2] So z.B. Convention on mutual assistance in the event of disasters or serious accidents, Frankreich und Bundesrepublik Deutschland, v. 3. Februar 1977, 1214 UNTS 19561; Convention on mutual assistance in the event of disasters or serious accidents, Frankreich und Belgien, v. 21. April 1981, 1437 UNTS 24347.

But in fact it looks like this:

[1] UNGA Sixth Committee, ‘Summary record of the 25th meeting’ (9. Dezember 2011) UN Doc. A/C.6/66/SR.25.

[2] So z.B. Maldives Faces Drinking Water Crisis, The Diplomat (5. Dezember 2014); Convention between the French Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany on mutual assistance in the event of disasters or serious accidents, v. 3. Februar 1977 (in Kraft getreten am 1. Dezember 1980), 1214 UNTS 19561;

So what it does is it “pushes” all Citations one footnote down, i.e. the (last) citation in Footnote 1 is now the first citation in Footnote 2. And this continues throughout the document.

I have had this problem in other Chapters and fixed in manually, i.e. by deleting each footnote in footnote 2 and putting it back in footnote 1. But this Chapter has like 400 footnotes and it is just killing me. Any help is much much much appreciated. I can also e-mail the relevant documents/pn them to any expert on that issue (I do not want to put up the entire document here as it is my Ph.D).

Best regards from Germany.

Anna

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Have you tried contacting tech support?  Not sure if there is one in Europe or if you need to contact the US one.  www.endnote.com/support  – the international page lists this

Germany

Bilaney Consultants
+49 (0) 211.364043

http://endnote-shop.de

I would first look at the unformated citations, to see if they reflect the error?  I am not sure what could cause this, as I have never heard of this happening before. It must be something consistent, if it has happened in multiple chapters?  What style are you using?   

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Dear Leanne,

I am using Bluebook Law Citation, a little bit adapted for the German way of citations.It looks the same in the unformatted citations. I contactedt the German support office but have not yet received a reply. With this happening now I must say I will discourage anyone to use Endnote- I am so upset.  

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Hi Anna,

I’m very, very sorry that you’ve encounted this issue, it’s obviously not a fun thing to have happen to your document.  Every time we hear a report about this sort of thing, we do our best to try to figure out how it happened in the first place so that the developers can make sure it never happens again.  I’m not sure that it still happens with the latest version, as these are pretty far and few between, but I do know that some of the likely culprits seem to be pasting formatted citations around in the document (or from one document to another), using track changes, etc.  I’m mentioning these not at all to try to assign blame or anything, but more to help you and others potentially avoid this sort of thing in the future.

We’ve got some tools to help out, please check out the following KB article (and as always, please make sure you’ve got plenty of backups of your document(s) when doing these sort of recovery steps):

http://endnote.com/kb/82361

We’ve also got some internal tools that do the same sort of ‘moving citations back’ trick based on grouped citations, or moving them in the different direction, etc.  So, if that article doesn’t do the trick, please do contact technical support at:

http://endnote.com/support

Finally, if you’ve got any backups of the document before or after the shifting that you’d be willing to provide to us, along with your workflow scenario and such, we’d greatly appreciate any information you could give that might help us identify how this happens and, more importantly, how we can keep it from happening again.  If you do contact tech support, please reference this post (just copy/paste the URL from your browser) to make sure the agent that responds knows the backstory.  Thanks, and again, sorry, and I really hope this post helps you out and makes your weekend a little bit better!

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Dear Rick,

thank you very much for taking the time for such a long answer.

It actually did help- but only partially.

The problem is now (it’s pretty hard to explain): The Makro fixes only the footnotes when they are in a separate document, not in conjunction with the normal Ph.D text. If I copy the text AND the footnotes (starting from the broken one), the Makro does nothing. It only works when I just have the footnotes in a separate document. However, there is not much use of having the fixed footnotes without the normal document text. I cannot delete only the footnotes and exchange them with the recovered ones. Any ideas anybody? I can also email the two documents (the one with the text+broken footnotes and the one with the fixed footnotes).

Best regards

Anna

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P.S.: Your post actually did make the weekend a lot better - I now see light at the end of the tunnel and hope that I will not have to convert every single footnote myself :angry: If only just the Makro is going to work. Best wishes from sunny Heidelberg!