Add asterisk before author last name in ref list, but still sort alphabetically

I’m trying to add a character (e.g…, “*”) to only some citations in a meta-analysis (to indicate which references are of the studies included in the meta-analysis)–but still have the reference list sorted alphabetically by author last name (APA style 6th edition). I tried to just add it before the first author’s last name  " * Smith, Jones, 1999" but EndNote sorts the reference list with all those references with “*” together–but I want it to keep the alphabetical order in the reference list—is there a way to do this, or do I need to have my final reference list and then convert it out of EndNote and just add the * manually?

So want it to look like this:

   Abel, D. B. (2001)……

*  Baker, A. C. (1999)

*  Cain, A. B. (2007)…           

   Charlie, O. M….

 * Dog, M. A…

  

The ideal would be to include the asterisk in a custom field and have it included (maybe with a tab following).  Not sure how you  can get it “hanging” though unless you lead with <custom field>tab (for each ref type template that will be using in your bibliography) then the rest of the template as hanging indent (set in the layout section at the very bottom right side). Don’t use the separator characters cause in this case you will want every reference to be indented.

But if you don’t use the “label” field for anything else, you could put your * in that field, and then adjust the style’s bibliographic “layout” setting to include the Label field (insert Label) and then insert tab, and make sure the hanging indent is set there too (as above).

haven’t really tested either.  just brain storming.   

Thanks! That worked perfectly, I put an asterisk in the “label” field, and then edited the formatting for the reference list so the label field cam right before the first authors last name.

Same problem here and your elegant solution seems to do the trick. However, this raises a follow up question… Let’s say I use the label field to add the asterisk as suggested, does it mean those references will remain ‘labelled’ with the asterisk in my EndNote library? What if I want to cite in another paper one of those references in a context where it does not require the asterisk (ie. not part of a meta-analisys), does it mean I need to ‘unlabel’ the reference? Seems like a tedious and error prone process… Still new to EndNote, any suggestions about this?

Well, you can use the edit function to remove any * for the next paper, before you start.  (maybe using the “edit>find and replace” option to replace the asterisk in the label field with nothing.  

If I were trying to keep track of records in a paper, I wanted asterisked (especially if multiple papers required it at one time), I would create a group to contain each set.  Do the above step to remove any previously askterisked records and then when I was needing a group of citations to contain the asterisk in a new manuscript, you could select that group and use the tool>change/move/copy option to replace the label field with the asterisk for that set of references.