I need your help. My co-author and I each have seperate Endnote libraries. When we are working on a word document together with CWYW, we are having some major syncing issues. Basically, his endnote seems to associate some of the citations in the paper as different works, and updates the bilbiography to different works. It seems to be changing papers based on the Endnote Record Number - so, if I send him a version of a paper with a reference to (Smith, 2014) which is record number #554 in my endnote library, and his endnote does not have an entry for (Smith, 2014), it seems to be updating the reference in the paper to whatever reference is Endnote #554 in his Endnote, which is, of course, a totally different citation.
It seems to leave the citation in the work unchanged, but update the bilbiography to include the totally different work.
Thus, the in the body of our text, it still says (Smith, 2014), but the bibliography will not have the Smith, 2014 record at all, instead, it would show:
Jones, J. 2003, Article Name, Journal, 1-32. (Which is the record that has the same Endnote Record Number in his Endnote library).
So our paper keeps having refrences that are cited in the paper missing from the bibliography, and an equivalent number of refreences that are not cited in the paper appearing in our bibliography.
To be honest, I think you need to go to tech support on this. I have heard others complain about this behaviour, but rarely. I don’t know if it has to do with work flow or is deeper in the coding of the program. I think the best way to attack the issue, is to call tech support and escalate it until you get a solution. (and then report it back to the forum!)
…My co-author and I each have seperate Endnote libraries…
When collaborating on the same document it’s important for the co-authors to be working from the same single/shared library. If both of you are working from separate Endnote libraries each library will use a different set of record numbers based on how/when each on co-author entered the records. The result will cause the in-text citations and corresponding bibliography references in the document to change due to having different records that happen to have the same record number.
You will need to integrate your libraries. If you’re using Endnote version X7 the software enables syncing and sharing references with c-authors. If you don’t have X7 you can integrate the 2 libraries, then email the file as a “compressed library file”. Note in both cases references sharing the same record number will be assigned a new number so the in-text citation will need to be adjusted.
The way endnote was originally designed, it shouldn’t replace a record number based on that info alone. It should match author, record number and year. The caveat to that, is that if the author matches any author on the paper in the author field - that is enough, so if Smith, 2000 #1 and Smith was one of a multi-authored paper #1 published in the colleagues library, in 2000, then it might also match. – but I was told by developers, that they were also embedding something in the code to match beyond the record number in the synced libraries (since the synced libraries can reorder the whole record number thing- which happened to mine when I had a corruption and resynced my desktop from the cloud version).
but it doesn’t work very robustly especially when one on occassion needs to unformat citations so I have had to reassociate my library entries with my manuscripts a couple times. I don’t like syncing, and I require my students and postdocs to use my library which is located in a read only form on our shared network drive. no problems since we stayed with that after getting bitten by multiple libraries with overlapping entries. (ie, they started by copying my library and then we independently added things to each, then when working on a paper together, they can’t both be open, because they have identical entries up to the shared point and then the rest are unique – or duplicates but with unique record numbers.)
So I still don’t know why you would get a citation that is correct, but the wrong entry is in the bibliography. What does the underlying citation (in temporary/unformated version) look like?
We are having exactly this problem. We are seeing citations being replaced at random when multiple users are working on a single document. At the moment I am assuming this is because although we are all using the same library, for each user the record numbers are different. This is making EndNote almost unusable for us as we cannot re-check all references every time a person works on a document.
I have reported this to EndNote support and they have said they can recreate the problem and are looking into it. However this problems seems to have been ongoing for several years.
We are going to change to using page numbers in our temporary citations and also avoid unformatting citations. So we will see if that helps.
I don’t really understand how it works though as most references update fine when a second user opens a document created by a first user (it’s just a few that go wrong) - I don’t understand how it updates when the record numbers are all discrepant. Unless it is using additional information embedded in the document (which is why I think we need to avoid working with unformatted citations).