Using the first word of a title when citing anonymous works

Greetings!

  EndNote X8.2 (Bld. 11343)

  Rules of a journal I am preparing a manuscript for require to cite an anonymous work by using the first word of a title only. The only option I see is the " Use Short Title in Place of Author", but this requires me to put additional effort to fill the Short Title field for every anonymous record.

EndNote technical support today confirmed that currently, it is not possible to fill the Short Title field using the first word of the Title field in batch mode.

Do you see a sense of having another option " Use the First Word of a Title in Place of Author" in the style editor?

Thank you.

I couldn’t easily read the other version and the original link led to the presumably deleted post misintrepreted to be spam, so I reformated it below (then found this post).  I agree it would be nice if the developers could generate an option to automatically grab the first word of the title, but aren’t there special rules about that too?  I would think if the title began with the word “The” it wouldn’t be very helpful, for example. (you might guess that I rarely use APA output styles as well).   I deal with very few anonymous works and so copying the necessary information into the short title isn’t a problem for me.  But I can see that some publications/styles allow for a truly “short title” of a few words, so it would be complicated further, when you were publishing in those journals, to change them back to a few words.  In my experience minor mismatches to the house publishing style are fixed by the editors during the preparation of the proof.  

@akazak wrote:

Greetings!

Rules of a journal I am preparing a manuscript for require to cite an anonymous work by using the first word of a title only. However, currently there is no such option, at least at the EndNote X8.2 (Bld. 11343):

Leave Author Blank : The author section of the formatted reference is left empty. If the references are to be sorted by author names, the anonymous works would be sorted at the top of the list because they have no author.

Use Full Title in Place of Author: Where the author would have appeared, the title is used instead. If the references are sorted by author, the anonymous references will be sorted as though the title were the author. If you would prefer that EndNote use the contents of the “Short Title” field in place of the full title (where available), click the “Use Short Title” radio button. If EndNote encounters a reference that does not have anything entered into the Short Title field, it uses the contents of the regular Title field instead.

Use Short Title in Place of Author : Where the author would have appeared, the short title is used instead. If the references are sorted by author, the anonymous references will be sorted as though the short title were the author. If EndNote encounters a reference that does not have anything entered into the Short Title field, it uses the contents of the regular Title field instead.

Use APA Specifications: The American Psychological Association format (used by many journals) requires a special variation of the “Use Title in Place of Author” option.

Insert Text : The text that you enter here appears in the author’s place in the formatted reference, and it is used for sorting purposes if the references are to be sorted by author names. Commonly this text would be something like the word “Anonymous” or “Anon.”

The only option I see is the “ Use Short Title in Place of Author ”, but this requires me to put additional effort to fill the Short Title field for every anonymous record.

 

EndNote technical support today confirmed that currently, it is not possible to fill the Short Title field using the first word of the Title field in batch mode.

Do you see a sense of having another option " Use the First Word of a Title in Place of Author" in the style editor?

 

Thank you.

 

Sure, while grabbing the first word of a title the EndNote should ignore articles & prepositions and capitalize the first meaningful word.

For example the first word of a title “A novel method for …” should be “Novel”.