EndNote X3 and Word 2007 user.
Ran across an issue with a string of references with no authors, so temp citations look like this: {, 2007 #95;, 2008 #97;, 2010 #93}. There are several users using copies of the EndNote library and then merging, so the record numbers can vary from the person who inserted it and the person who reformats later. When a later user reformats, it appears that if the record number and the year match (even if no other field matches), EndNote will insert the reference without asking. Is that correct? EndNote only uses those 2 parameters to determine the right record? If so, is there any way to change that?
Of course, if you unformat and then reformat the references, you do get a prompt to insert the correct reference from a list of choices. Is that the only solution?
Thanks!
Tracy
If an unformated temporary citation has no author, than yes, it can pick up the wrong reference, as the unique identifiers are the Author, Year and Record number . Why are there no authors, though? That is usually only the case when some one has specifically omitted the author, to incorporate it into a sentance constructed as "Smith and Jones (1997) have reported … ", which would rarely be the case when multiple references were being cited?
I am not sure whether formated “cited references” have an invisible additional linkage in X4 though. I know it can resolve Author, Year in a different library, but don’t know how it works, with Year, record only. Any other users have time to test that?
We have a custom reference type for drug package inserts, and those have no author.
Then you might want to consider (but I suspect you would need to make all your users, make this change?) changing the EndNote preferences for the “Temporary Citations” to use Page numbers or label field as the unique identifier? See the attached image for your choices. Of course your records would still need one of those three fields to be filled as well in all your users libraries.
Citation matching is based on these fields - Author, Year, Title, Pages, Volume, Issue, Secondary Title, RefType, Record Number. This is hard-coded into EndNote and cannot be changed.
In version X4, we did add some additional logic to make EndNote smarter about not having to rely on the record number but if a document is shared with EndNote citations in the unformatted state, the Record Number does need to match or the user will be prompted to disambiguate.
From the description here, this seems to be working as designed but if anyone disagrees, please send me a sample library and document and we will investigate.
Jason Rollins, the EndNote team