I’ve once again formatted a paper, only to lose many (although not all) of my citations. Unformatting does not seem to recover them. The last time this happened, I was told (by the wonderful Leanne) to put my library on the hard drive, rather than a flash drive, which I’ve religiously adhered to ever since. Apparently that wasn’t the problem after all.
So, how do I go about finding these citations? And how do I keep this from happening? I guess the latter might be too much to ask, since it’s been going on since Endnotes 1.0, but you’d think they’d have FIXED this problem by now!
I’m using Endnotes X now, and the paper was formatted on a PC that has Windows 7, I suppose, and Word 2008.
Actually, that’s not quite right. It was the corrupted library that was caused by living on the flashdrive. As far as I know, my library is still fine. At least, it still sorts just fine. This is the same-ol’, same-ol’ issue of disappearing citations that has been going on for at least 15 years. I know because it happened to me the first time while I was writing my dissertation.
So, WHY do the citations go away, and how do I stop it from happening? I don’t ever, ever, EVER, use the evil CWYW.
Word 2008 on Windows 7? --probably not.-- so is it Word 2007 or 2003? (or 2010, which won’t work with X).
I really can’t imagine what is happening, as I have never had this happen (and I have worked with Endnote since DOS days, same library). You are losing citations that are curly bracketed, as you aren’t using CWYW? This makes no sense. Have you changed versions of the word processing program/operating system, etc that might have led to some word processing issues?
Sorry, that was the other thing I was going to check when I got back to campus. It’s Windows XP Professional, and the Word version is the one with the ribbons…2007 it says on the shortcut.
So… the citations were in curly brackets, yes, but now they are just sad little white spaces, which I am filling in one by one with new curly brackets. I’m learning…obviously too slowly…to save a FINAL unformatted copy, but honestly, this hasn’t happened for a couple of years and I just assumed they would have fixed such a fundamental bug by now.
Latest update: I added all the citations back in, SAVED the unformatted file as a backup, and the bib ran just fine. I’m sure it’s the whole saving process. :-/
So…it’s apparently been awhile, but I’m learning not to panic. In fact, I seem to have “fixed” the issue, but it’s so weird I’m looking for a better explanation. I now have Endnote 21 and (thanks to my previous escapades) I’m not syncing with the web version any more, nor am I using Dropbox or Google Drive. All versions of the document are right here on the C:drive.
However, when I formatted the paper (APA 7th), the citations all looked like formatted citations but a) they aren’t editable and Endnotes tells me there are no citations in the paper, b) there is no bibliography and c) when I try to unformat, I’m again told there is nothing to format.
So, I had a weird brainstorm. The last paper I formatted was in Chicago, so I reformatted in Chicago. It worked!! I hadn’t made any footnotes, but the bibliography all appeared, safe and sound. I was even prompted for a few citations that had some issues. So, then, I reformatted to APA and all the citations appear, as does the bibliography.
I’m inclined to leave well enough alone, but obviously there is something bad going on. Better to figure it out and fix it now!!