Preview shows et al. after the 1st author. Setting says list all author names.

Hello. We are using EndNote X9 on Windows 10 and MS Office 365 ProPlus which includes the MS Word program.

I manage the shared library and have 5 users. We use a modified version of the Chicago Manual of Style. One of the users has his authors showing as the 1st author, et al. in the reference preview pane. The rest of us have all the authors listed in the preview pane.

I checked the settings in the Output Styles Edit [name of the style] Bibliography Author Lists settings on his EndNote and on my computer and on another users computer and the settings are all the same. We want all the authors to be listed. He has the correct settings.

But in case I can’t read, I updated the the reference style, and I went to Preferences Folder Locations and made sure the style was saving in the correct folder. In this case it is the C:\Users\username\Documents\EndNote\Styles. I did find a copy of the style in his folder and deleted. I checked the date the style was created and made sure he has the same one listed in the About This Style information.

I have closed EndNote and restarted a couple of times.

Any ideas? Thanks for any help.

There are two places an output style can live.  The user space and the “installed styles” folder which on a windows machine is on the C: drive in the Program Files (x86) endnote X9/ STYLES folder.  If there is one with the same name in both places, Endnote is eclectic about which one it uses, usually defaulting to the C drive version.  

Hi Leanne,

Thank you for your quick reply. I checked the C: drive in the Program Files (x86) endnote X9/ STYLES folder as you suggested and did not see the custom style that we use listed on the problem child’s computer or mine, either.

However I had a quirky thing happen this morning. An installation of the desktop EndNote was made last Friday for a new user. I invited her into the Shared Library, she accepted, and then she was successfully synced with the library. This morning, I added the custom style by opening it on the S: drive folder where we store it and saved it to her computer in C:\Users\username\Documents\EndNote\Styles. I then imported the Reference Type Table with the custom reference types that we use. I checked to see if the custom style was in the C: drive in the Program Files (x86) endnote X9/ STYLES with the other standard styles and it was not there, so that was good.

Then I looked at a preview of one of the references with multiple authors and it was doing the et al. thing like the problem child computer even though the style setting Bibliography, Author Lists, Abbreviated Author List, List all Author Names bullet is checked. So I opened Word and added a reference to see if the et al. followed into the reference in Word. It did not. It listed all authors. As did the problem child computer yesterday when I did a test reference in Word. The quirky thing is this. Once the reference was sent to Word on the new user’s computer, the preview on EndNote switched immediately to listing all of the authors. And now her previews are OK. So I went back to the problem child computer and tried 3 times adding a reference to Word both by adding it from Word using the EndNote tab and by adding it from EndNote using the Insert Citation button. But even though all of the authors are there in the Word references, the previews in EndNote still says et al.

So I don’t think it is really an EndNote problem, but a problem between EndNote and Word. I think we are going to have to live with it maybe until there is an upgrade to the Word software or to the EndNote software. This is a recent problem, possibly tied to upgrades in Word or Office. Although we are all using Office 365 ProPlus, the version of MS Word is 1902 on the problem computer and it is version 1808 on my computer and the other users computers.

Thank you for your time and attention to this issue.

Yes,  Microsoft is continuing to “evolve” and not always in a good way! ditto Endnote.  I continue to tear my hair out, occasionally.  Fingers crossed at least you are getting what you want, even if you can’t explain it.