I am currently a PhD student in a humanities field and we in humanities love long footnotes with multiple references in one footnote. As currently set up, Endnote adds a period to the end of every ciation, leaving periods in the middle of sentences when they don’t belong there. Currently there is no way to get rid of them easily without changing the output style, etc. That creates even more problems as seen in the link below. Also, then one has to add a period after every citation, even if there are no page numbers necessary. You need to add an “exclude period” checkmark like you currently have now for the author and year in the edit footnotes dialogue box. This problem alone is keeping almost every professor I know from using Endnote becasue they are annoyed by this.
It appears that X4.0.1 (which I use with Word 2007) also has that problem. I very much wish that EndNote will soon offer a check box that lets you decide whether or not to add a period at the end of a citation or not. I am spending hours after hours generating my citations over and over (without ever saving the resulting file) in order to find the best solutions (or rather workarounds). Given the severe problems connected with editing output styles, one should not have to edit anything in order to obtain the desired results; that is the software’s job.
Just to give an example of a workaround I had to create for one note was to change my text from
* The most detailed sources about Stevenson are {MacDonald, 1989 #350} and {Scott-Sutherland, 2005 #330}
to:
* The most detailed source about Stevenson is {Scott-Sutherland, 2005 #330} See also {MacDonald, 1989 #350}
Otherwise my note would read (see the superfluous period after “1989”):
The most detailed sources about Stevenson are Malcolm MacDonald, Ronald Stevenson: A Musical Biography, NLS Themes of Scotland (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1989). and Colin Scott-Sutherland, Ronald Stevenson: The man and his music — A symposium (London: Toccata Press, 2005).
I agree that the change is rather minor, but having to modify the content of a given text to account for the idiosyncrasies of a piece of software is not acceptable.
This is still my most frustrating part of using Endnote. For such a seemingly small fix, this issue creates huge problems for anybody in the humanities.
I am glad that someone is reviving this thread, which was created in 2008. I offered a detailed example in October 2010 that shows the shenanigans required to sidestep the problem and, so far, no one at EndNote has reacted. It would be nice to know whether they agree that this limitation is an obstacle to efficiency and intend to come up with a solution. As the previous poster so aptly put it, this is creating problems for people in the humanities.
Another bump. Three years later and this problem still exists. I cannot recommend this product to anyone in the humanities until this problem is fixed.
It saddens me to say that, eight months after I last offered some explanations about this major issue, the original poster had no choice but to revive the thread again in the hope of eliciting a response from EndNote’s programmers. As I tried to show in an earlier post, no one should have to recast the contents of the notes in order to avoid some of the software’s limitations. A very significant segment of the scholarly community has to live with a problem that they should not have to care about. EndNote, now in its fifteenth version, should have matured enough as a piece of software to have found a solution to this problem. Many would appreciate if the programmers kindly agreed to at least give us an idea of where they stand with regard to this issue.
I received a note from an Endnote employee who imformed me they will look at this issue and post an update here after they have discussed it as a team. I am happy that they are responding to my post and hope they will decide to fix this issue in their next update. I understand they can’t implement all the suggestions, but I think this one is worthy of some time investment. Thank you to Endnote for looking into this matter.
Are there any developments in this regard? I hope that reviving the thread (which was last updated in July 2011, i.e., two years ago) will elicit a reply from the publishers. Does the new X7 version fix this major problem which, as the above posts show, is a major annoyance for users in the humanities? It still is a problem with X5.
I have X7 and it is still not fixed. My last contact I had who was working on the issue is no longer in the same department and when my concerns were forwarded, I received no reply back. So looks like this is dead in the water. I cannot recommend this program for humanities.
Just an update for those interseted in this. I received an email from Thomson Reuters about this issue. I am sad to report that it looks this this issue won’t be resolved anytime soon. It appears there are more technical issues involved than can currently be solved, partly due to trying to make the program as easy to use for everyone.
I can sympathize with wanting the program to be easy to use for all, and I understand that the humanities probably uses Endnote less than the sciences, but I am still disappointed that after five years or more there hasn’t been a good solution to this problem.
They are recommending users with the problem to adjust output styles (I think they mean here to remove the periods at the end of citations and entering them manually when wanted) or using cited pages and suffix text. Those are quite inellegant solutoins, but they are the best we will have for quite some time by the sound of it.
I do want to thank Endnote for responding to my inquiry in a helpful manner, even if it wasn’t the answer I wanted. I do understand it is a challenge to balance the needs of their various users.
Hi. I happened to read this thread and thought I could contribute. I believe I accidentally found a solution to this problem as I was completing my thesis.
I found some of my notes without a period at the end of them (and in other places periods missing too). When I looked at the reference in Endnote I found that I had left an extra space at the end of the field which would normally have a period after it. This occured also in the CWYW addition of the page number. So I corrected this where it was needed, but I used it to deliberately remove the period at the end of some citations when I wished the citation to be wtihin a sentence. E.g. Following [Citation1] and [Citation 2], but against [Citation3] - for citation 1 and 2 I added an extra space after the page number in the modify citation (more) area and this neatly deleted the terminal periods after the page numbers without adding any extra space.
When I found this it looked to be like a deliberate feature of Endnote - though I have not looked for any documentation on this.
Has there been any progress with regard to this major problem for people using notes (i.e., most users) in X8? This topic was started in November 2008 by jtskier1200r and was revived a few times (2009, 2010, 2016). The update by jtskier1200r (28 April 2014) following a communication by the designers did not bode well for a timely solution. This remains for me the chief concern with EndNote. When will we be able to write the text of our notes without having to resort to various shenanigans to avoid periods appearing in the wrong places?
Thanks for bringing up this idea. I haven’t worked in Endnote for a bit, but I am coming back to it for a larger product. I am going to have to try this and see if it causes any problems, but my initial test seems promising. Thanks for pointing out the removal of the period if you put a space after the page number. That might work well.