EndNotes inserts same citation multiple times

When I select a citation and click on insert, the citation is inserted correctly. However when I move on to insert another citation somewhere else in the paper, EndNote inserts the new citation, but then re-inserts previously inserted citations over and over again in a long string 50 or more times. If I inserted multiple citations after the same sentence, it goes back and re-inserts them in a long string. I have pages and pages of the same citation over and over again. I removed all of the extra citations but they reappear if I close Word and then re-open or if I add a new citation somewhere else. I’ve been using EndNote for 10 years and yesterday was the first time this happened. I have a recent version. How can I fix this?

On a Mac?  I have heard people report this in the forum – the fix for this appears to be the same as for any of the “corrupted” fields.  Make a copy of the documnet. – open the copy – Unformat the document to curly bracketed temporary citations – Then you can use the endnote function to convert to plain text or select all and use the word short cut to unlink fields.  (this is usually crl+Shift F9 on a PC, but not sure of the equivalent on a Mac).  Then you can try reformating and see if fixed.  

Thanks, Leanne.My computer is a PC Windows OS. I’ll try what you suggested. When I move the cursor over the citations, only one of the many repeated citations is highlighted in gray. The remaining repeated citations just show up as plain text, which is puzzling.

But do they all “unformat”?  – usually word is set to only show the selected field, so, since each field is separate, only one would highlight at a time?  

Thanks again for your responses. The problem resolved, although I’m not sure how! I manually removed all of the citations and deleted the spaces before and after each citation, then reinserted each citation. Voila, end of problem! Could there have been some invisible code in those empty spaces???

Another problem surfaced with multiple citations. Instead of having parentheses just at the beginning and end of each multiple citation, the left parentheses were also inside citations, i.e., (Smith, 2008; (Jones, 2009; (Lennox, 2012; (Brown, 2014). I removed and reinserted each citation, rechecked settings, the citation template and everything else I could think of, but I couldn’t find the problem. Finally, I converted citations and biblio to plain text and fixed it manually.

Glad to see it was finally resolved. Unfortunately bugs like this do pop up from time to time.

To see what is going on, I would need to see the actual formatted word document and the endnote output style (<dot>ens) file.   The ;atter is easily attached, the former (word document) will need to be zipped first, or the 3 letter extension changed to trick the system into accepting it.  

Hello,

Can I ask the same question?  I did what you suggested but it does not work. Once unformatted, I cannot convert the text into a plain, in the word tab. I’m working with Office Word 2016 and Endnote X7.   Thank you very much for your help. Kind regards

Alejandro,  I think I answered your question here: http://community.thomsonreuters.com/t5/EndNote-General/repeated-intext-citations/m-p/132969

  1. Press [Ctrl]+A on the keyboard to highlight everything. (or Command+A on a Mac)
  2. Press [Ctrl]+6 or Command+6 on a  Mac) (above the “T” and “Y” key) to remove any additional hidden field codes.