Hi,
I saw a couple people in past forum posts from about 2010 were having this same issue but unfortunately all the links to the help pages are now broken.
I had endnote between 2 computers, synced to Endnote web. One computer has Endnote X6 and the other has X3. I was doing a paper on the X3 computer, and then switched to the X6, and when I hit the “update all citations” button in Word, it scrambled all the references. For example,
“Salts eventually dissolve and dilute to undetectable levels (Pitt et al 1999).”
became:
“Salts eventually dissolve and dilute to undetectable levels (Fischer et al 2003).”
And it is apparently random too, because the same Pitt paper turned into like 2 or 3 different wrong citations.
What is going on here? It’s kind of too late for me because this paper is due today but seriously, a bibliography software should never ever do this, it is a nightmare. Now I’m afraid to open any other papers on this computer.
I should rephrase my question - under what circumstances does this scrambling happen and how can I avoid it in the future?
I created a workaround by deleting the old X6 endnote library, creating a fresh one using just the data from Endnote web, and reverting to a previously saved version of the document.
If anyone has any information on what caused this, please reply!
Hello, lodelia:
That sounds awful; I’m so sorry! I have only seen that happen once or twice before, so it’s a little challenging to say what may have caused it. I’d love to see if we could find out.
Could you please start a support case here:
http://endnote.com/support/contact-support
Feel free to put my name in the subject line so that it comes directly to me. I would love to get the document from you to see if we can ascertain the root cause so that this does not happen again to you, or to any users.
I noticed that you mentioned having X3 on one machine and X6 on another… May I ask why this is? You are allowed to install X6 on up to three computers for your own use, and it’s a lot simpler to do that than to switch versions constantly, especially since you can use Sync to keep the references in sync across the different machines.