Punctuation and spaces at end of repeated citations

A research student of mine, using the Chicago 15thA style in Endnote 10 for Mac, finds unwanted spaces and commas at the end of repeated citations in footnotes.  She would like to add punctuation outside the citation.

In abbreviated citations for articles there is an errant comma followed by a space.  For books there is a space.

We’ve tried various modifications of the style without success.

I notice this was described as a bug in 2005 in the endnote list archives.

Does anyone know how to eliminate these without having to do a manual cleanup at the end, after de-linking from Endnote?

Many thanks,

Ross Langmead 

I have just discovered a workaround for this most irritating of bugs. If you put a comma after the short title in the Endnote field, the space appears after the comma. You can then put any text you wish immediately after the field code so that it appears normally. Instead of Immigration Control , n 289, you get Immigration Control,  n 289 (so you will probably have two spaces before your next bit of text, but this is easier to deal with since you can control the second space with Word).

The easiest way to do this is to add a comma at your short title field in your database using the Change and Move Fields option. Go to the References tab, Change and Move Fields, select Field Short Title, and ‘Add text after field’, and then put a comma in the box. Uncheck the ‘add a space before new text’ box. It will then add a comma to the end of all your short titles. However, if you do this, it will add a comma to empty Short Title fields - to reverse this, you can first find all references that have a single comma in the field (as you’ve just added it) through the ‘find’ function (Find, select Short Title field, select ‘Is’, and type a comma) and then Change Text (on the Edit tab), replacing the comma with nothing (leave the second box blank). 

I had already put cross-references after all my repeated citations (in the form n and the number), so then to clean up all the punctuation around it I used Word’s find and replace function - but it’s probably best to do each individually!

Having said all this, it looks more complicated than I thought, but I assure you it only took a few minutes and now I don’t have to worry if I really do need to reformat the bibliography again!