When you correct an item in the EndNote library (misplaced comma, etc.) I’ve learnt, working with EndNote X1 and Word 2007, that to get the Reference List (e.g., in APA 5th) to update with that correction you need to delete the incorrect citation from the document using Edit Citation / Remove, and then do a fresh Insert Citation for the corrected item.
The difficulty is to find all those faulty citations in the instances where the Author name is excluded from the formatted in-text citation. In a long document where one author with numerous works is cited frequently it can be quite laborious to track down every instance of a faulty reference.
In the case of a misspelling it’s relatively simple just to search through the document with all Field Codes revealed in Word and find citations that contain the misspelling, but it’s not nearly so easy when the error was something like a stray comma (or space!!) in an Author name, and you have dozens of citations that, formatted, just read “(2003)”.
Does anyone have a simple way to tackle this?
(I thought one solution might be to create a temporary Output Style that wouldn’t allow exclusion of the Author name, but this seems not to be possible.)
Does the CWYW ‘Edit Citations’ dialog not help in this case? See the attached screen shot that shows an example of two in-text citations with both Author and Year removed. The ‘Citations in Document’ panel displays some contextual text to help you locate the citations even though they are effectively hidden in the actual document text. This is a simple example for illustration purposes but this should be helpful for a much longer document too.
Temporarily change the “formatting options” preference “omit author/year if deleted from the temporary citation” and the whole citation will now appear. If you can spot the wrong ones, great; if not:
I would then create a style that inserted the full [Author, Year #RecNo] citation (note, with the other bracket type, not the {} ones). This will restore the full citation to the bracketed form in the manuscript. You could try that. If it pulls it from the temporary and you still find it hard to find them, on a copy, select all, and unlink fields (ctrl shift F9). Change the format bibliography option to use that bracket for the temporary citation, and Endnote will reformat but won’t be able to find the old reference in the library and will prompt you for the corrected version.
Slightly tedious. I still think the embedded temporary library should be optional; something you could turn on if the collaborative feature was something you really needed, but only when you needed it!
Actually, unformating and reformating the document will probably restore those to the new version from the library, if it is only depending on the Year and record number to make the match?
I would try that first, before my much more complicated reply!
Thanks, Jason, for the suggestion, but the problem with the ‘Edit Citations’ dialogue is that it’s very unwieldy when you have to work your way through many hundreds of citations in a book-length document.
