Same author, different name variants

EndNote EndNote How To
1

Hi there,

Can anyone tell me how I manage entering the same authors but with different name variants.

At the moment, EndNote treats each entry as a different author, and therefore gives unnecessary initials in citations. 

For example, ‘Katharine J. West’ has published under both this name and ‘Kate West’.  Same person, only needs to be cited as (West, year).  Instead, EndNote gives either (K. West, year) or (K.J. West, year), making it look like Kate is two people.  Annoying.

Ideas?

Cheers,

Lindy 

2

Sorry, Endnote is not clairvoyant.  It won’t know they aren’t two different people.  I wouldn’t know it!

Just like it won’t know if two John Smith’s are really different people. 

There are just some times that you need to use some human intervention with computers.  Isn’t that reassuring? 

When about to submit, turn off CWYW or unlink the fields on a copy, and make the necessary changes. 

3

Thanks for the advice.

I hoped there would be a function that allows automatic linking of names, but you can’t have everything.

Thanks again,

Lindy 

4

Should be possible, similar to the Scopus feature. But I am not sure how often it is necessary.  What about someone who gets married?  Should the references reflect that too?  I don’t think so.  Middle initials included or excluded in author lists?  Luckily, in most scientific journals, we use the year letter approach or numbered references and this kind of thing rarely matters to us. 

5

I am also writing in science and indeed use the year letter approach.  The point is, will the functionality of the program allow that to be reflected automatically or will I need to go through a 100,000 word thesis with a fine tooth comb to check every possible confusion?

Where the program should say (West, 2003a) and (West, 2003b), it says, as noted above, (KJ West, 2003) and (K West, 2003).  Hence my annoyance.

This is not only imprecise, it is incorrect citation.  It looks in the text like there are two Wests commentating on the issue, when in fact there is just one.

6

Hence, I turn off the ambiguous settings.  see http://forums.thomsonscientific.com/ts/board/message?board.id=en-general&message.id=543&query.id=3932#M543 for the two places to adjust. 

7

Thanks.

I tried that, but that now creates the opposite problem: for different authors with same surname, their works are listed as (Turner 2008a) and (Turner 2008b), making it look like there is one Turner who contributed many works.

It looks to me like there is no real solution here, other than to change citations by hand later as per your earlier suggestion.

Perhaps name linking could be a function introduced to a later version of EndNote to deal with this situation.

Thanks for all the time you’ve devoted to my query. 

8

I would be inclined to say it is West’s problem if she is publishing under different names!

9

Well as a final work-around, I suggest that you select and edit each citation via the dialog and hide the author for the West refs, and put “West” in the prefix and it will reflect what you want it to reflect.