Finding and Formatting citations removes years

I have a large document full of unformated citations, e.g. (Smith 1980), (Jones 1998; Perry 2000), Jones (2000). Since I have always used Endnote by editing citation codes, I had hoped that I could transform these into codes by globally searching and replacing ( and ) with the curly brackets { and  } I use as citation delimters, then Updating citations and using the dialog box to find and select the references. So far so good, Endnote does this very well. HOWEVER, it only inserts a reference code that is missing the year - for instance {Gaunt,  #38}. What controls this? I hasten to add that its over 1000 citations, and I will have to edit some to do specific things - for instance “Gaunt {2000,  #38} -> Gaunt (2000)” - so losing the years when I insert in text citations is causing me real headaches. I must add that I can replicate htis behaviour in Endnote X3 and X&. HELP!!!

Are you missing commas preceding the year?  The easiest way to solve this is to edit your preferences in Endnote to display the author and year regardless of what is in the temporary citation.  

this is under “formatting” options as shown in the attached jpg.  

If you want to repair these, you can create a dummy output style which produces {first author, year #record number} (or accession number, which I use) as the citation template.  After that you can return your preferences to the defaults and removed the author or year, when you wish to use those options.