Many ambiguous citations

We use modified author-date style references in which ambiguous references are labeled a, b, c, alphabetically by title. Never thought I’d have this question, but it might happen soon: What if I have more than 26 references with the same author and the same year? Can EndNote start from the beginning again using double suffixes (aa, bb, etc.) or some other disambiguation method? 

This is a real possibility because we are working on a large report in which we cite many documents from just a few government agencies, and there are already multiple ambiguous records in my library. I did a dummy trial, inserting 50 records from my main library (all our own documents, Windward 2010) and found that after z, I got nonsense suffixes (tildes, vertical lines) or blank boxes.

I can’t find anything in my EndNote manual (version X2) about this. Am I in big trouble here?

Kay

I couldn’t find anything in the manuals either about the lettering. Seems the implied limit could be 26 letters but you might contact tech support to about the letter-limit: http://www.endnote.com/support/entechform.asp

In the meantime, do the documents have unique titles?  If so, you might consider disambugating the citations based on title instead (you can choose between “full” or “short” titles). The setting may be accessed in the output style Citation’s “Ambiguous Citations” setting. [Go to the EndNote toolbar, select EDIT, OUTPUT STYLES, EDIT name of your style.]

Short titles are likely based on the Short Title field - so the info (e.g., first word or words of the title) will need to be added to that field. For further info, check the manual or “Help” via the toolbar.