I’m currently using Endnote X2 (Windows Vista Ultimate OS).
My current research project requires citing a healthy number of government documents. However, after choosing “government document” under the Reference Type, I found that I didn’t exactly like how it was formatting the actual bibliography.
So I went into the editing process of the particular style only to find out that under the Templates section there was nothing associated with “government document.”
Of course one can go through the process of inserting the Reference Type. But my question revolves around just this issue:
Because I would have to build the Reference Type from scratch (inserting the fields myself), I do not know if I am violating some form of formatting protocol in going step-by-step. I’m just guessing here, in other words.
So, my question is: is there any website that is officially or unofficially associated with Endnote which might show a “government document” user exactly how to set up this particular Reference Type?
Or perhaps better yet, are there any premade Reference Types that can be downloaded?
The easiest way to start, is to add the Gov Doc template (select from “Reference Types” dropdown button) and then to copy the generic template to the blank template. This will automatically convert the “generic” field names to the Gov Doc field names and eliminate the field names not used. And this would be the order that your style had been applying when there wasn’t a designated Reference Type template.
Now you can carefully edit it to what you want it to look like. Take note of the |punctuation marks-little circle-fieldname| markings. The |(forced separation) and little circle (link adjacent) are essential to keeping punctuation only when the field has information in it and are available (along with the Gov Doc field names) from the Field drop-down button.
In Endnote X2, it will ask you to save it to a new file name, and then you need to load that file name. Don’t close it, but select it in your Library field, and use the preview tab of the library, with a Gov Doc record to tweak the style until you get the punctuation, spacing and order the way you want it.
I’m having some difficulty properly citing government docs too. If I enter the info as I understand it via “add new reference”, EndNote automatically formats it as “author, first initial.”, even with “government document” selected as the template for the reference.
So, I end up with the “Services, U. S. D. o. H. a. H.” instead of “United States Department of Health and Human Services”.
I’m a new user and confident that the error is on my end, but I was hoping you might be able to help me out here. I’m using EndNote X2 for Mac on Mac OS 10.5.6 and Word 2008 Mac with CWYW. Thanks for any help you may provide.
I suspect that your problem may lie not with your output style but with the data entered in the Department field. This field feeds data into the Author term list, so entries into it need to be handled in same way as Corporate authors with the end of the corporate name indicated by a comma eg World Health Organization needs to be entered as World Health Organization, .
Thanks very much for this information. I’m going to continue to play around with it to hopefully get things just right.
But I did have a follow-up question:
When entering the actual Reference information, under the Department field, I’m entering “HM Treasury” (which stands for "Her Majesty’s Treasury). (As you can obviously tell, this is a report associated with the current UK’s budget.)
In the actual bibliography output, however, I’m getting “H. Treasury” – the “M” is missing and of course a period has been inserted as well.
How do I go about changing how EndNote X2 is formatting this?
When entering the actual Reference information, under the Department field, I’m entering “HM Treasury” (which stands for "Her Majesty’s Treasury). (As you can obviously tell, this is a report associated with the current UK’s budget.)
In the actual bibliography output, however, I’m getting “H. Treasury” – the “M” is missing and of course a period has been inserted as well.
How do I go about changing how EndNote X2 is formatting this?
Thanks again!
As Patti noted just previous, this is another case where you need to add a comma at the end of the name., in the record.