I have to wonder WHY this utterly insane decision was made not to include record numbers in syncing. It makes the entire sync/share feature… virtually useless. Essentially, it means you have a synced library which is not synced.
Working with formatted citations as suggested above is NOT a useful option in a program like Word, for several reasons:
- It’s horribly slow. Having to wait 30 seconds for the entire bibliography to be recreated every time you need to add or change a citation in a document is completely unworkable
- It’s prone to errors that will either cause mistakes in output or corrupted documents
- It requires that EndNote is installed on all contributors’ machines
There is a reason unformatted citations are there – they are so much faster, safer and more practical to work with when several people collaborate on the same document.
But they also require record numbers to remain accurate across computers – which is not, it seems, possible. Why on earth would unformatted citations be made to rely on precisely the one piece of information that is not synced in a synced library? The sheer insanity of this boggles the mind!
Anyway, now that I’ve ranted and raved for a bit, perhaps someone can help me figure out a solution for my current problem:
I’m currently editing a book together with another editor. The book comprises ten chapters written by eight different authors. The final product must have one joint bibliography for all chapters at the end of the book. Most of the authors do not have access to EndNote at all and don’t know how it works. Myself and the other editor maintain a synced and shared EndNote library containing all references from all ten chapters. The library currently has about 6,000 sources, and it is not uncommon to have more than one source where author name and year of publication are identical (i.e., what will show up as Smith 2018a and Smith 2018b).
Several of the chapters are very long (some over 150 pages) and on average have perhaps eight or ten citations per page – so probably over a thousand in a single file. Working with formatted citations in these documents is completely impossible because it’s so slow. And of course, if an author, when working through a round of proofs, fixes something in a formatted citation by simply replacing the text, that change is obliterated the next time anyone makes any kind of actual EndNote change – something we cannot risk. So formatted citations are right out, and we’ve been working with unformatted citations as much as possible.
The chapters are currently in separate files, each file going back and forth between editors and authors for proofs; but in the end they will have to be combined into a single file in order to create correct formatting for citations and the joint bibliography across the entire book, before being imported into InDesign for proper typesetting. This will be my job, and it’s what has me really worried.
Since EndNote references have been added by two different people, using a synced library whose record numbers apparently don’t match as we had just assumed they would, it seems likely that many, many citations will end up having an incorrect record number in the unformatted citations in the document. This will prompt EndNote to ask me to manually choose the appropriate source in each case that cannot be unambiguously detected by author + year + record number.
In cases where there is only one possible match, this will mean that the final formatting will take a long time (manually confirming thousands of citations), but it shouldn’t cause any serious structural issues. If I could be sure there are no ambiguities, I could just delete all the record numbers, since EndNote will at least properly match an unambiguous citation by author + year alone.
In ambiguous cases, on the other hand, I will have to somehow figure out all over again which source is being referenced – something we’ve already done when adding the EndNote references, and exactly what the record numbers were supposed to keep track of to begin with. This is something that requires being able to see the context in which a given citation appears and checking which work by the person cited makes more sense in the context – but of course you can’t see the text in the document when EndNote/CWYW is working on updating the bibliography and asking you to select the correct source for a given citation.
Can anyone think of some way to achieve the goal of combining the ten files into one, hitting “Update Citations and Bibliography”, and then actually getting all the citations to match with the correct sources in the EndNote library without having to manually select them all – particularly the ambiguous ones?
Edit: I just noticed Leanne’s link to the ‘little book’ which explains how to use the Label (or in my case, Accession Number) field as a permanent record number. This gets me some of the way. We started out using a single library stored in a Dropbox folder, which caused us a fair amount of problems but at least meant that the record numbers were consistent; we only recently switched to syncing/sharing a library. Luckily my copy of the library is the one shared, so _most _of the record numbers in the document (hopefully) match mine. The only ones that won’t work should then be the ones that were added by the other editor after we switched over to a shared library