EndNote Web - changes to the reference library don't show up my Word 2007 bibliography

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1

Hi all,

I am able to insert references from EndNote Web into a Word 2007 document using CWYW plug-in. The bibliography generates itself just fine.

However, when I update the references on the EndNote Web site (for example, I fixed a problem with a title in a book that was cited), those updates don’t appear when I use the Word 2007 CWYW EndNote Web plugin command “Update citations and bibliography”.

It seems EndNote Web is different than EndNote. The latter always goes to the database for the source of the references (if I recall correctly).

With EndNote Web, it’s like there’s a copy of the inserted references in my Word document (maybe this is the so-called Traveling Library?). I must admit this is a bit frustrating and I hope someone can help.

How can my Word 2007 document get the changes I made in the original database?

2

I did some experimenting, and learned some more about this problem. It seems to be a design limitation: since references are copied to Word in field codes (rather than using some kind of dynamic link to the EndNote Web database), any changes to the EndNote Web database are difficult to get back to your document transparently.

Again, I’m used to how local Endnote integration works. When I decided to try out EndNote Web, I expected some of these things to work the same way.

There is the “Convert to unformatted citations” feature, but I’m not sure this is a solution with EndNote Web. This takes all field-coded citations (the copies) and converts them to something that looks like a reference to an EndNote library.

However, it’s not practical at all. Some citations (which didn’t include a name) end up as {, 2009 #137}. Even if I get a name in the unformatted citation, like {Smith, 2008 #254}, when I try to generate the bibliography with the EndNote Word plugin, it doesn’t find any of the references. It’s searching for the entire text, and EndNote Web doesn’t like the #254 or whatever. It does allow me to go through all the references again, re-finding them, which is annoying when all I did was a small change to a single reference.

Regarding the design choice to copy citations into word (as opposed to linking to an EndNote Web library)… Being an IT person, I can see how from a performance perspective, it’s better to store copies of references in the Word document. If the EndNote Web site got hit up for information about every citation, every time a user generated a bibliography, there would be a lot of traffic.

However, when that data is no longer consistent (e.g., a change is made in the main database), there should be a solution that works to allow that change to propagate to the bibliography, as it does with an EndNote local database. “Convert to unformatted citations” seems like it could be a solution, but it doesn’t easily work.

Any other ideas to solve this problem are welcome. In the mean time, I am going to try a local Endnote database for my next collaboration with a graduate student on a paper. The synchronization of data might be cleaner as follows:

EndNote Web <–> EndNote local library <–> Word 2007 document 

3

Hi, did you ever find a solution to this? 

4

Sorry, I don’t have a solution. I can tell you I hadn’t used EndNote in a few years until last month (I was doing collaborative editing using LaTeX/BibTeX and Google Drive).

Last month I was using Word 2013 and the latest EndNote (local database) and didn’t try to use the web database (wasn’t collaborating on the document). 

5

Hi, 

I just stumbled upon this thread as I was having the same problem. it’s an old thread but I thought anyone else who is currently having the problem might find it and want to know the solution. 

Although not totally automatic, the best solution I have found is to click “edit citation” on your plug-in once you hace selected the in-text citation you wish to update, and then in the menu, click the little black arrow next to the citation you wish to udpate which will open up a drop down menu. From there click “update from my library” and select the new citation you wish to use. Hope this helps!

Quentin

6

Hi, 

I just stumbled upon this thread as I was having the same problem. It’s an old thread but I thought anyone else who is currently having the problem might find it and want to know the solution. 

Although not totally automatic, the best solution I have found is to click “edit citation” on your plug-in once you have selected the in-text citation you wish to update, and then in the pop-up menu, click the little black arrow next to the citation you wish to update which will open up a drop-down menu. From there click “update from my library” and select the new citation you wish to use. Hope this helps!

Quentin