In-text citation problem: organization name with a comma

EndNote EndNote Styles, Filters, and Connections
1

I have a formatting problem with an in-text citation in APA (5th) with a
corporate author whose name includes a comma. In my EndNote library, I entered
the author field as:

Society of College, National and University Libraries

This produces the correct entry on the reference list:

Society of College, National and University Libraries. (2008). Best Journal Article Ever. Association of Something Journal, 5(6), 177-179.

Note that I did not include a comma at the end of the author field; when I did, it resulted in an extra comma in the reference list entry. 

However, the problem emerges with the in-text citation. The citation appears as (Society of College, 2008), with the remainder of the organization’s name omitted.

I could not figure out a way to modify the output style to correct the problem. I have come up with two unsatisfactory work arounds: 1) I included the second part of the organization’s name as a suffix (which also necessitates omitting the year and including it in the suffix, too); 2) I entered the second part of the organization’s name in a random unused field in the record and then modified the output style to
place this field after the Author field.

Does anyone have a better suggestion???

I am using EndNote X1 on a Windows Vista PC (Word 2007).

Cheers!

2

I don’t have a simple solution to this problem.

On the other hand, I would prefer EndNote to continue behaving like it does now with double commas: Double commas are useful, I’ve found, for personal authors whose names end in a word element rather than initial. For example, “Ginneken, J. van”, which should not appear as “Ginneken, J. v.”, is output correctly if entered in EndNote as

Ginneken, J. van

That is, EndNote puts everything exactly as entered after double commas into the reference list, but omits it from the in-text citation.

As a workaround for corporate bodies with subordinate parts, I would

a) enter the author in the library reference as you have, i.e.

Society of College,bNational and University Libraries

b) edit the in-text citation in Word to exclude author, and enter the prefix as

Society of College,bNational and University Libraries,b

… where b is a blank space. If wanting to minimise typing and errors, the prefix can be copy-pasted from the preview window in EndNote, and thenthe “,b” typed after it.

If working with unformatted citations, this would be entered as

{Society of College, National and University Libraries, , 2008 #xx}

… where xx is the record number. This can be safely copy-pasted in Word for subsequent citations.

Cheers,

John

3

Thanks for this comment - “…I would prefer EndNote to continue behaving like it does now with double commas…” - improving/changing this behavior is perpetually on our “to do” list. I would be very curious to hear other opinions on this - either votes to keep it as it is - or - detailed suggestions for ways this behavior might change/improve.

Jason Rollins, EndNote Product Development

jason.rollins@thomsonreuters.com

4

John-Arnold, thanks for your suggestion. Of course, I would prefer not to have to use a work-around, but fortunately, this scenario doesn’t come up very often.

I hadn’t tried to use double commas in a reference before this, so I can’t really gauge the usefulness as it currently stands.

5

Dear all,

I have a problem with authors with commas, too. I am using Endnote X2, Microsoft Word 2007.

I have: “Ab, c and co.” - as author and I want to have it handled wholly as “last name”. The double comma only seems to influence the appearance of “first name”, not of “last name”, which is intended.

The addition of a double comma after Ab or a single comma at the end does not help at all, since it does not allow a comma to be in the last name.

Since I cannot find a workaround here, I suggest to add a handling of “last names” with a comma in it.

Thanks!

6

ToStue wrote:

Since I cannot find a workaround here, I suggest to add a handling of “last names” with a comma in it.

 

good idea, I posted it for you under the Suggestions forum. 

http://forums.thomsonscientific.com/ts/board/message?board.id=en-suggest&thread.id=206&jump=true

7

Leanne,

excellent idea!

Thanks

8

Dear all EndNote users

who still have problems with names which have commas in them:

Try the easy, effective, and no-error work-around of inserting a lower single quotation mark instead of a comma in the position that you want the comma to appear at. This will keep both, your bibliography and your quotations perfectly correct.

This is the sign I used: ‚

which is not distinguishable from a normal comma (,) - at least, I don’t see any difference in Calibri, Tahoma, and many other Fonts.

I hope this will help a lot of people who were struggling getting their quotations right. I am using X7 and the problem is still existing, so I suppose, Thomson has not done anything about it yet.

9

Nice one Fred - that’s a top tip. Almost makes up for the disappoinment that in the best part of a decade, Endnote still hasn’t addressed this problem…

10

Thanks fredz, your suggestion works.

I find the exact symbol in Word, called single low-9 quotation mark, in General Punctuation subset of Symbols.

Charater code: 201A from Unicode hex

Charater code: 130 from ASCII decimal

Charater code: 0082 from ASCII hex

11

Anddddd… still, two years later, not fixed.

Thanks for the tip. Solved it for me.

A