I consider the inability to exclude authors and years from citations embedded in footnotes and endnotes a serious flaw in EndNote’s design. One can request that authors and years be suppressed for a citation by enabling the appropriate checkboxes in the Edit Citation dialog, but this setting has no bearing whatsoever unless one is creating an inline citation. If the same citation is placed in a footnote or endnote, the user is out of luck because endnote purposefully ignores this setting for non-inline citations. Quite confusing! Thanks to a call I made to Thomson’s technical support desk today, I’ve learned that this is not a bug, but a badly implemented design feature.
At best, the checkboxes on the Edit Citation dialog that control these choices should become disabled when a given citation is being placed in a footnote or endnote, for at least that would end the confusion over why the author or year shows up despite the fact that the checkbox was selected. I suspect that just as easy of a fix could be had by abandoning the notion (at least superficially so, if not altogether) that inline citations are wholly different things from footnotes and endnotes and thereby treat all references wherever they appear – inline, in footnotes, and in endnotes — in an identical way. Easy or not, making such a change to EndNote’s feature set would go a long way to improving it and preventng the most akward of workarounds or the abandonment of EndNotes help for the footnote- or endnote-embedded citation in question.