A few months ago, I was having trouble with one of my thesis chapters (it was very slow to insert references) and I ended up unformatting and reformatting the citations.
Since then, I noticed that some citations were incorrectly inserted. I have re-checked all of them and have re-inserted correct citations where needed. But I am worried about this happening again. This particular document is also very slow again when inserting references so at the moment I am just using temporary citations.
Is there anything I can do to avoid incorrect citations being inserted in the future? My worry is that once I merge all the chapters, if some incorrect citations are inserted, it may be very easy to miss them and my thesis will end up with some incorrect references and citations. Any tip on what to do before I merge all the chapters to avoid this problem?
Am wondering if the problem persists if you copy the content to create a new document file. Have you tried running a test by first making a copy of a finished chapter. Now using the copy, unformat the citations then copy the entire content to a new document. Save the “test” (new) document; then format the unformatted citations/bibliography?
Since you say the problem persists regardless of the computer/Windows version used, it may suggest there’s something occurring with the MS Word file … or possibly the EndNote program - is your program updated with any applicable patch?
Thanks for your suggestion. I am not sure why this particular document keeps giving me trouble. I have just followed the ‘clean up’ instructions at http://www.endnote.com/support/faqs/cwyw/faq15.asp and now using the new document. When I tried a similar thing earlier in Feb, I didn’t see this FAQ so I didn’t do step 4 (Press [Ctrl]+6 (above the “T” and “Y” key) to remove any additional hidden field codes).
So far I haven’t noticed any errors (but I have only checked the citations I was having trouble with before) and haven’t had the time to check all the individual citations again as that will take me a few hours.
I have done my Thesis in similar way to you. I kept chapters in separate documents but EndNote froze every time I wanted to merge chaters. I asked technical team for an advice and they told me to keep unformatted citations in separate documents. I never manually “edit” citation. I always put them via CWYW, although ocasionally copy/paste them in unformatted form. Once, I have been happy with the chapters, I’ve merged documents with unformatted citations. It took time because EndNOte had to process 7 chapters, 3 appendicies, something like 200 references, and separate List Of References for Chapters and for appendices.
Now, I always work with unformatted citations and update them when final version is ready.
Perhaps need to make a new document and copy paste everything there. Are you sure you did not mess up with database? Perhaps you have different versions of the same database and EndNote is not linked to the correct one?