Combing more than 2 chapters together stalls word

I have 7 chapters in my thesis, each about 14,000 words in separate documents. I want to combine them together.

I do what everyone has suggested - unformat the citations in the documents and then combine the chapters together, which all works fine. Then I click “update citations and bibliography” and this works for a few minutes, but then word stalls and I get (I’m on a mac) the apple rainbow spinning wheel, which is stalling on any other system. I then have to force quit. I have worked out that I can combine two chapters without this happening, but three and beyond stalls. I have tried on two different computers.

Does anyone else have this issues? Any tips/ideas? 

I would try a different series of steps:

These are the procedures we recommend when merging documents to minimize issues. Please note that the below steps will produce a single bibliography at the end of the document.

  1. Create a blank document where you will place all the chapters.
  2. Make a backup copy of all the documents you wish to merge.
  3. Open the documents to be merged in Word.
  4. Copy the text of the individual documents, but NOT the reference list. It is important that you do not include the reference list as part of what you copy.
  5. Paste the text from the individual documents into the new blank document.
  6. Once you have created the merged document:
    Windows Word 2007/2010/2013/2016: Click the EndNote tab and click Update Citations and Bibliography.
    Mac Word 2003/2004/2008/2011: Go to the Tools Menu and select the “EndNote > Format Bibliography”, “EndNote > Bibliography Settings” or “EndNote > Configure Bibliography” command. 
    Mac Word 2016: Go to the EndNote tab and choose the “Bibliography > Update Citations and Bibliography”
    This procedure will create a formatted Microsoft Word document with one bibliography at the end.

Please note that you may get the “EndNote Select Matching Reference” dialog box when formatting the bibliography. This may be because you have modified the author name or the year in one of the references, or you may be using a different library. Please click here for information on how to resolve this.


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