I am currently writing a report and am using Endnote to reference literature. Having written some with 12 references, I saved and closed the document and Endnote. I have now reopened the document and Endnote (with my Endnote library open) and when I tried to reference a paper (i.e. make it reference no. 13), Endnote automatically makes it number 1. So I have two ‘1’ references in my paper and in my bibliography. It’s almost as if Endnote has started another Bibliography by itself. How can I fix this?
Are you running Endnote X8 or did you install the recent update* (X8 .)? Besides the update the numbers may have shifted due to a corrupt citation. Refer to the knowledge base article http://endnote.com/kb/82361
*To check for updates go to the Endnote bar and select Help > Check for Updates.
Was your document stored in any cloud storage service? Also, could you confirm whether you were able to change your in-text citations to temporary ones (a.k.a. “unformatting” where the in-text citation now has curly braces and displays the author name and record number). If you are able to change the in-text citations to temporary citations then change them back into formatted citations then at least we know the Endnote field codes are still present in the document.
Also, when you changed the in-text citations to temporary citations, did you proceed to check for any corrupt citation as described in that knowledge base article? If you are unable to locate the corrupt citation, suggest you try deleting the first citation and see if the remaining citations update to a correct sequence of numbers. If so then it seems that the first citation was the problem so just reinsert the citation and see if the number sequence updates correctly
An image probably won’t help. You could try to zip up the file and attach it to a reply message along with the output style or name of the output style, if you haven’t edited it.
When I try to ‘unformat’ citations nothing happens, they all stay as superscript numbers in the text. If I try to ‘convert to plain text’ I recieve the message: ‘There are no EndNote field codes in this document’. I have entered citations by dragging them from EndNote to the location in the document.
Then your endnote citations have been erased, but I don’t see any reason why, from all you have said. You drag them in, and they should appear transiently as {author, year #recno} and then get converted to the citations and bibliography that match your Output style. They should be “grey” fields when you hover your cursor over them.
At this point you should be able to do the unformat step (convert to unformatted)
then save it, but don’t close – you should be able to do the update/unfomat steps
then save it, close and reopen – they should be grey and you should be able to do the update/unfomat steps.
if not – then are you SURE you are saving to .docx, doc or rtf and not to .odt for example and reopening that document? – That is the only scenario I can see that would remove the fields. Or someone else is doing so.
Do you have a previous copy, which you can convert to unformated citations and compare to the plain text version? Accept/reject (which ever is appropriate) keeping the citations in curly brackets and the opposite to keep the edits you want to keep. Any newer citations left, will need to be reentered.
There are other ways to work thru the citations – for example, if numbered, you can create a new library numbered the same order by dragging and them dropping them and convert the numbers to {#number} by searching and replacing the ( with {# and ) with } and ask endnote to update the citations, with only the new library open. – if there are groups of references, it might be easier to just bite the bullet and replace them all. If you are using an author, year style this is sometimes easier.