Multiple issues after error message

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1

Hello,

After I made minor changes to my references (I wanted to add an organizational name), I received an error message from Endnote saying “An Unknown Error Occured”. I wasn’t able to close Endnote anymore and had to restart my laptop. Since then, various issues occur that I am not able to solve:

  • one reference appears in the bibliography within Word twice. However, this reference is only listed once within Endnote and shouldn’t appear twice. I deleted the reference, re-entered, refreshed both Endnote and Word, opened an older word document, but the reference shows still up twice.

  • I have authors  with publications from several years. While Endnote usually displayed them as (xyz 2015, xyz 2016a, xyz 2016b), the author will be automatically deleted now (xyz 2015, 2016a, 2016b). Interestingly, the program does it not systematically, but for certain references only. Also, references from the same year do not appear sorted (e.g., 2015a, 2015b), but scarred (e.g. 2015c, 2015a, 2015b).

As mentioned, I restarted and refreshed Endnote and Word, deleted and entered the references, made sure that the correct style appears in the ribbon within Word, but still the same issues again.

I would greatly appreciate any ideas for a solution!

Thank you!

2

I would first make sure you have updated your EndNote to the latest version:

For X7 see

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-X7-Updates?language=en_US

For X8 see

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-X8-Updates?language=en_US

I would then use the following steps to clean up any document corruption:

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-Problematic-field-codes-causing-jumping-cursor-the-range-cannot-be-deleted-or-other-problems-while-formatting?language=en_US

If this does not resolve the issue then:

Please contact Technical Support directly.

1-800-336-4474 option 4 then 1 or

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/technicalsupport?language=en_US

3

@sandydee wrote:

 

  • I have authors  with publications from several years. While Endnote usually displayed them as (xyz 2015, xyz 2016a, xyz 2016b), the author will be automatically deleted now (xyz 2015, 2016a, 2016b). Interestingly, the program does it not systematically, but for certain references only. Also, references from the same year do not appear sorted (e.g., 2015a, 2015b), but scarred (e.g. 2015c, 2015a, 2015b).

 

For the above.  The author is only automaticaly deleted if all the authors are exactly the same. This is a failing of Endnote’s handling of Smith et al type citations with Smith authoring multiple papers but with different authors, so they don’t get combined.  

for the sorting issue, the order is based on sorting criteria in the citations and in the bibliography.  Often that is based on Authors and subsequent authors and not on order cited, which is the usual publisher requirements, even though it can look funny to the writter (so b might come earlier in a stand alone citation that a cited later).  Often the citations are set to the same as the bibliography (which means they should be sorted in order a, b, c), but if the citation sort in the output style is set differently from the bibliography, you could get them jumbled in an in text citation.