OK, so I’m set for APA, all the citations look fine. The reference lists the author as “Smith, A.”, as it does in 5 other references by the same author. The style is set to display the name as “Doe, John”, which has never changed and works as advertised 99.99% of the time. I drop in the citation and I get “(A. Smith, 2017)” when every other one reads “(Smith, 2017)”, or “(Smith, A., 2017)” when there’s more than one Smith.
I’ve read through all the posts, many similar but not the same. “Fix the style setting”, “Correct the reference data”, etc. … Did it, tried it, been there … citation is not changing.
Why doesn’t the style preference apply to every citation? In fact, what is the point of having a preference setting if the software just treats it like a suggestion? This is like when MS Word suddenly decides to do my spell-check in French for no apparent reason.
OK, I get it … there’s some little bit flipped someplace, but I really don’t have time to search every little drop-down menu for preference exception, or got through the file source searching for wayward flags that should have been erased. It would be easier for me to just type it in correctly as text without EndNote, but part of me wants to understand why, fix it, and go back to trusting the software.
There’s some little mysterious situation or condition that’s causing the software to make this choice over the preference I selected and I’m appealing to the EndNote gurus who are intimately familiar with all the various subtle nuances of this code to tell me exactly where I can give this product a swift kick so I can move on.