Funky date issue

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I am having trouble getting EndNote X1 to display a date as requested by the journal. The following snippet is from their website:

Addiscott, T. M., and R. J. Wagenet. (1985, March). “Concepts of solute leaching in soils: A review of modeling approaches.” Journal of Soil Science 36, 411-424.

I thought I understood how to accomplish this. Here is what I did:

  1. changed “Date” and “Year” fields to correspond (ex: Year = 1985; Date = March)

  2. changed the template for bibliography to be: Author. (Year|, Date|). “Title.”…

  3. updated citations and bibliography in Word 2007

The above would have resulted in the following:

Addiscott, T. M., and R. J. Wagenet. (1985, March 1985). “Concepts of solute leaching in soils: A review of modeling approaches.” Journal of Soil Science 36, 411-424.

I then tried a couple other options in the effort to understand what is going on. For example, I changed the template to be “(Date)” and  deleted entry in Year field for the article. The result was “(1985, March 1985)”. So I deleted the year from the Date field - mind you, the year is nowhere in the entry. I got “(1985, March 1985)”. 

I am confused as to why this is going on. Admittedly I have used only the basics of EndNote and this is my first foray into changing the templates. Any help?

AJJ

UPDATE :

As soon as I finished the above post, I decided to check one other thing. The issue it appears to be a library issue. The reference I was working with in the library that was open (call it LIB1) was #9. The reference noted in Word was #46. After checking, it appears I have the wrong library open  :angry: (call the correct one LIB2). There is no telling how long that has been going on. Now the question is how I correct the references? Do I convert to LIB2 and import all entries from LIB1? Is there a way to change libraries associated with a document? 

I know from the forum that the long run solution is to go to one library. The concern I have there is the number of entries in the file. I have nearly 400 entries in LIB1 and just over LIB2. I have several other references in other libraries as well. That is a mountain to sort through. Any longterm suggestions?

Message Edited by Chaostamer on 12-31-2008 01:14 PM

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My “personal” suggestion for your long term is to use single “master” library. You can categorize and manage entries within the master using groups and sometimes using term lists. When I first used Endnote, I started to make many small libraries with different categorical names, but I had difficulty keeping track which one has what, which one is duplicated across libraries, etc etc. Also, when I was writing manuscript, I had to open at least 5 or 6 libraries and the same thing happened as you experienced. Then, I decided to merge all of them together. It took for a while to merge them, but I used custom filed to label each entry with library name. Now, whenever I work on manuscript, the only library I need is this “Master”.

Merging itself isn’t that big task even you have several hundreds. Just select all, copy, and paste all of them to the one you want merge. Then, you want to remove duplicated entries.

Risk of “Master” is possible corruption of the file. I recently experienced “delayed write” failure in Win OS (hard drive was breaking down), and opening my Master gave me “database error”. Recovery commad did not recover any entry. I was in panic…Luckily, I had three mirrored hard drives in several locations, and I recovered my master from one of them. In fact, one of the mirrored HD had the corrupted one, because of my automated file synchronization software. I was really lucky, I found the corruption of my master before the synchro software overwrote the last one.

But once again, this is my personal choice. You could continue to use separate small libraries if you are confident to keep track each of them.

Best regards,

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I agree with Myoshigi (I usually do!) in making one master library.  However, I also strongly suggest backing them up occasionally and not just mirroring! 

You can import each library into your master, and use the discard duplicates option, or search for duplicates at the end. 

If you are working on documents already formated, the travelling librarycould retain the original references.  Which can be a good thing. 

But be careful. If the original library is not available, it will keep the original reference in the travelling library. Therefore, if you update the reference and want the new reference information, you should delete the original, and reinsert it.   

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>strongly suggest backing them up occasionally and not just mirroring!

Yes, I totally agree after that incident! Backup, Backup, and Backup!

And congratulation Leanne, you are now Endnote Guru!

Wish everybody has a happy new year!

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Thanks to you both for your help. I am working on the suggestions and it looks positive.