endnote X6 scrambled all my references?

Hi,

I saw a couple people in past forum posts from about 2010 were having this same issue but unfortunately all the links to the help pages are now broken.

I had endnote between 2 computers, synced to Endnote web.  One computer has Endnote X6 and the other has X3. I was doing a paper on the X3 computer, and then switched to the X6, and when I hit the “update all citations” button in Word, it scrambled all the references.  For example, 

“Salts eventually dissolve and dilute to undetectable levels (Pitt et al 1999).” 

became:

“Salts eventually dissolve and dilute to undetectable levels (Fischer et al 2003).” 

And it is apparently random too, because the same Pitt paper turned into like 2 or 3 different wrong citations.

What is going on here?  It’s kind of too late for me because this paper is due today but seriously, a bibliography software should never ever do this, it is a nightmare.  Now I’m afraid to open any other papers on this computer. 

I should rephrase my question - under what circumstances does this scrambling happen and how can I avoid it in the future?

I created a workaround by deleting the old X6 endnote library, creating a fresh one using just the data from Endnote web, and reverting to a previously saved version of the document. 

If anyone has any information on what caused this, please reply! 

Hello, lodelia:

That sounds awful; I’m so sorry! I have only seen that happen once or twice before, so it’s a little challenging to say what may have caused it. I’d love to see if we could find out.

Could you please start a support case here:

http://endnote.com/support/contact-support

Feel free to put my name in the subject line so that it comes directly to me. I would love to get the document from you to see if we can ascertain the root cause so that this does not happen again to you, or to any users.

I noticed that you mentioned having X3 on one machine and X6 on another… May I ask why this is? You are allowed to install X6 on up to three computers for your own use, and it’s a lot simpler to do that than to switch versions constantly, especially since you can use Sync to keep the references in sync across the different machines.