Curly Braces in Word Document That Aren't for EndNote

Hi all,

(Apologies if this has already been answered, I could only seem to find explanations on citations appearing in curly braces when I Googled the issue.)

I have some text in my document that requires curly braces but is not an EndNote citation, now when I try to update citations EndNote keeps trying to find a reference relating to the text in the “{ … }”. This wouldn’t be so bad if the structure of one of the not-EndNote pieces of text didn’t cause the update process to fail with an “unknown error” before it finishes.

Any advice, other than removing the curly braces from non-EndNote things? It seems a little anti-social of a program to just hog a viable character like that (I’m writing a document featuring some small programming extracts, for those unaware curly braces are extremely common!).

Thanks for your time,

Chris.

Endnote’s temporary citation delimiter can be changed from the default “curly braces” to another format (e.g. brackets). Go to the Endnote toolbar and select Edit >Preferences, click on the “Temporary Citations” option and change the citation delimiter (see attached image) then click the OK button.

You can use any unique pair of characters that you don’t regularly use.  Like # and % or ^ and *  as you might find [] used in your writing too?  

By the way, these can also be changed in the format bibliography menu (dropdown) in word on the endnote ribbon.  

Hi CrazyGecko,

Sorry for the delay, I had a break from writing.

I probably should have mentioned, I’m using the free “Cite While You Write” plugin for MS Word. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the specified settings, I have a feeling this might be a limitation of the free software. I’ll accept your answer as the solution for now though, as it will likely help someone else who has paid for the software.

Thanks for your help though (and you Leanne)!

Chris.

“I probably should have mentioned, I’m using the free “Cite While You Write” plugin for MS Word. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the specified settings, I have a feeling this might be a limitation of the free software. I’ll accept your answer as the solution for now though, as it will likely help someone else who has paid for the software.”

Clicking the “Update Citations and Bibliography” button and ignoring all my pieces of code featuring “{ }” has lead to a menu where I can select the temporary citation delimiters. It was failing before this point before, I couldn’t say why it’s working now, maybe EndNote also needed a break from writing this report!

Thanks again,

Chris.

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