Organization with "The" in Its Name as Author

Hello,

I am using EndNote X8 for Mac and Microsoft Word for Mac v15.32.

I would like to cite a web page by “The National WWII Museum” using the APA system. This system’s reference list guidelines state organization authors with “The” in their names should have the “The” appended to the rest of the name (e.g., “National WWII Museum, The”). Reference list entries written by said organization authors should be cited by the next word in their name after “The”. With in-text citations, however, the author name should be printed as usual (e.g., “The National WWII Museum”).

How should I handle this?

  • Does EndNote have some kind of notation that encodes “The” in author names? If so, would I need to change any settings to have EndNote sort the reference list correctly?
  • Alternately, how can I edit a reference list manually in Word to reflect these changes?
  • Are there any other workarounds to this problem not listed above? The best I could come up with is to prepend the organization name with its acronym (e.g., “NWWIIM (The National WWII Museum)”) in the EndNote entry author field.

Thank you for your assistance!

Just as a point of clarification, the APA 6th edition (section 6.25) calls for alphabetizing works (in the reference list), by organizations or no writers, based on the first significant word of the name. So organizational names beginning with the article “The” would have “The” excluded from the sort in favor of the next significant word. However, in-text citations would include “The”

Unfortunately, EndNote is unable to omit articles such as “The” in organizational names in favor of the next significant word while sorting the references for the bibliography. Odd, given that APA has this requirement.

Although there isn’t an option for EndNote to do such selective sorting, there is a manual workaround which involves: 1) creating a custom field across the reference types which will be used to hold the author/organizational name; 2) copying the author/organizational name from the Author field into the custom field; 3) editing the custom field within each reference record to remove any articles appearing in organizational names; and 4) editing the output style’s bibliography “Sort Order” to sort by the: Custom field + Year + Title. This sort order ensures Endnote uses the custom field instead of the Author field to sort the entries. Since the Author field will remain as is, the names will be printed in full in the bibliography

While I was aware that APA ignores the articles when alphabetizing the titles and organizations as authors, I have never seen an instruction to append it to the end.  Endnote can correctly alphabetize the title without this “cludge”.  You will need to add the word “The” to the sorting table preferences as shown in the attached image.  I found this to be case sensitive (hence “the” and “The” are in my list, but you really only need “The”)  

This gave me the preferred output 

The European Backcross Group. (1994). Towards high resolution maps of the mouse and human genomes - a facility for ordering markers to 0.1 cM resolution. Human Molecular Genetics, 3, 621-627.

Sugimura, R., & Li, L. (2010). Noncanonical Wnt signaling in vertebrate development, stem cells, and diseases. Birth defects research. Part C, Embryo today : reviews, 90(4), 243-256. doi: 10.1002/bdrc.20195

Theriot, J. A., & Mitchison, T. J. (1993). The three faces of profilin. Cell, 75(5), 835-838.

Are you sure that the “The” should be appended in the references?  If so, then you are correct, and you need to enter it as “National WWII Museum, The” in the record (double comma or “The” will be abbreviated to a T as an initial).  

If you prefer your citations to include the acronym or if you need the "The National WWII Museum in the citation, the easiest fix is to hide the author and enter the Acronym,<space> or full name into the prefix field with the edit citation tool.