Is there a way to automatically shorten corporate author name in citation?

EndNote EndNote How To
1

Hi everyone,

I’m using EndNote x9. I have created a custom output style (my university uses a bit different rules) and was searching for a way to automatically shorten corporate author name in citation and can’t seem to find one. The problem is as follows.

I have references like this one (usually a website with no author and no creation date or only a corporation name):

Aladin – Website of the ALADIN Consortium. ALADIN and AROME. [URL to the source here] (Accessed 2017-01-08)

I have set the correct way such references appear in bibliography, but encountered problems with citations themselves. Since there is no date, the citation appears like this:

(Aladin – Website of the ALADIN Consortium)

The rule is that citations with missing authors should include up to 3 words of the corporate name (followed by “…” if there are more) and in case of missing creation date, accessed date should be used. Basically, I need it to look like this:

(Aladin – Website of…, 2017-01-08)

Is there a way for me to achieve this using Endnote? Or will I have to enter these manually?

2

It really depends on how many of these you have and what you consider “manual”.  

Manually using the “edit citation” options you could hide the author (no need to hide the year, since there isn’t one, but it might be cleaner) and enter exactly what you want to appear in the citation prefix (abbreviated author name) and suffix (, type in the accessed date). 

I actually prefer to make the endnote version hidden text, and use the text to create my altered version, as plain unhidden text.  This way, I can see the original endnote citation, if I want to.  the Hide author and year above is more or less “invisible” until you modify it.  

(Aladin – Website of the ALADIN Consortium)(Aladin – Website of…2017-01-18)  (where the underlined is endnote and the text following is your manual insertion, just using word.  

Finally, if you have many, you can choose to modify the bibliograph’s web template or a new custom template just to handle those without a year, exactly as you want them to appear.  It would require putting the abbreviated author in Author, and the accessed date in year, so the citation template would give you the correct items.  Then custom or other author fields to report the full author name in the bibliography and the year is now after the words “accessed on”.  Webpages or other resources that have a year or aren’t too long, would still be marked as the normal ref type.  This is probably pretty complicated as you have 2 parameters to accomodate. 

3

Hi Leanne, thank you for the answer. I have many of those, that’s why I would love to have an automated solution. What you suggested is exactly what I thought I will do in case there’s no other option. This means I’ll have to edit a lot of entries.

It is weird that one can not change the way Endnote inserts citations or at least add more options…