Replaced and crashed references - multiple computers and users

Hi all,

We still can’t solve the problems with multiple users/computers. Situation: scientific lab, co-authors working with the same paper (and everyone want to change something!). People use Mac and PC computers, and different versions of Endnote (mine is X1.0.1, Word 2002, Windows XP). Few months ago, we were not aware about traveling libraries, and we used different libraries (everyone used his/her own), which caused replacements of multiple references, and first author fixed that manually at the final step.

Then I googled the solution about traveling library. Now we send every new version to each other along with the library. It looks like it helps to prevent references’ replacements. But now we have another problem - some references losing formatting and became links to another’ people library. What I mean - I create text with references, create traveling library, send all these files to co-author. He changes text/references, using my library, then send me back. I open the new file and his library - and now some references inside the text are still references (you can see authors when you move mouse over the link [3]), but some references became inactive - they are just links with pathways such as C:/…/library9_17_11. If I try re-format references, Endnote asking me about each working references and showing the paper to chose from the current library, but just ignores all these crashed references, despite that I have them in the references list in the end of document. Last time I spent whole day to fix that and replaced all these crashed references to new.  And now… I’ve got new version of my paper from the co-author and again the same problem. He claim he used my library and did not touch references at all this time. I should kill another day to fix all that stuff again… :cry:

Could you please help me and explain what can we do? What’s wrong?

Thank you.

I would share the paper in the unformatted state, to avoid this kind of behavior.  Turn off CWYW on the document, and inserting citations works fine, but you will need the various libraries to format it at the end (which you seem to be trying to do anyway).  If your collaborator moved or deleted text which contained references, Endnote would trigger a refresh of the citations in the document, even if they don’t think they “touched” any references. 

I suspect it has something to do with the most recent versions of Endnote trying to be clever and avoiding the problem so many complained about that the traveling library version of a citation/reference was frozen if it became “disconnected”.  So that “fix” is probably a “bug” in your situation.  I would contact the developers (and not just tech support) for this one. 

Thank you! I’ll fix the current version and send it next time with unformatted references. Hope that will help.