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EndNote

Citing in Word

EndNote can add citations in Word almost automatically and also change from one citation style to another.

After you've added references to your EndNote library, to cite them in Word, one recommended way is to go to Word, open a document, then click on the EndNote ribbon in Word, then click the magnifying glass icon at the left of the ribbon. A new window should open. In the Find field, you can search for the citation to add by any word in the reference or search for * and all references in your EndNote library will be listed. Click on the reference you want to cite, and then click the Insert button. You can also use the control key to select more than one reference to cite at one time. Word will use the citation style that is selected in the EndNote ribbon, and you can change the style by clicking the Style list or click Select Another Style to search for a style that is installed on the computer but not yet listed. If the style needed is not installed, you can download the style from EndNote's website, save it in EndNote desktop, and then select it in Word.

Some other ways to add citations in Word (other than using the magnifying glass icon to search for the citations) are: click the lower part of the magnifying glass icon (says "Insert Citation"). The option "Insert Citation" simply opens the find citation window like the magnifying glass does. The option "Insert  Selected Citation(s)" adds the citation that is selected in the EndNote library. Another way to add a citation is to select the needed reference in EndNote and then click the "Insert Citation" icon in the EndNote desktop toolbar or click the EndNote Tools menu + point at Cite While You Write + click Insert Selected Citation(s). Or you could select the needed reference and click Alt + 2 to add that citation to the current location in Word. Yet another way to add the citation is to drag the reference (the one-line listing) from the EndNote library to the correct location in the Word document.

Editing or Deleting Citations

Some ways to change an in-text citation are: when using the magnifying glass icon to find and add a citation, instead of clicking directly on the Insert button, click the down arrow that is part of that button; this provides the options of adding the citation as Author (Year) or Excluding the Author or Excluding the Year or adding the item in the Bibliography only (not as an in-text citation). If an in-text citation has already been added and one of these options is needed, you can right-click the in-text citation, then point at the sub-menu Edit Citations and click the appropriate option. One addition option in this menu is Exclude Author & Year. Yet another way to access these same option is to click the in-text citation, then click Edit & Manage Citation(s) in the EndNote ribbon. This opens a new window. Make sure the correct in-text citation is selected in the upper part of the window. Then the same options can be selected using the Formatting list. In addition, this window allows adding Prefix, Suffix, or Pages to the in-text citation. Most citation styles as implemented in EndNote (as I understand) do not make use of the Pages field. The APA style is the only one I know of that does use the Pages field. If paging is needed in another citation style, you may have to provide the appropriate punctuation and paging in the Suffix field (for example, ", pp. 23-24").

Some ways to delete an in-text citation are: completely select the in-text citation and press the delete key. Or backspace through the in-text citation. (This should result in the in-text citation being deleted before having to backspace all the way through.) Another way is to right-click the in-text citation, then click the More sub-menu, this opens the Edit & Manage Citations window. Make sure the intended in-text citation is selected at the top, then click the down arrow on the Edit Reference button for that citation and then click Remove Citation. This option can also be accessed by clicking the in-text citation and then click Edit & Manage Citation(s) in the EndNote ribbon. This window also provides direct access to deleting one reference from a multiple-reference citation. Find the multiple-citation in the window and then click the citation for the specific reference, then click the down arrow beside the Edit Reference button and click Remove Citation.

Creating Separate Bibliographies

Subject Bibliographies

Click the Tools menu + Subject Bibliography. Example: for creating an Author name bibliography—click Author, possibly uncheck “list each author separately”, click OK, then click “Select All”, then click OK. Next, click the Layout button, click the “Bibliography Layout” tab and delete any data under “Start each Reference with”, click the Terms tab, and uncheck “Subject Term Counts”, then click the Print or Save button. You can save the file as rich text (includes font formatting and can be opened in Word), HTML, or as text.

Copying Formatted Citations

Select the references in EndNote that you want to use in the bibliography and then click the EndNote Edit menu + Copy Formatted, then paste into Word or email

Copying a Citation from Preview

In EndNote desktop with the desired citation format selected, in the library panel click the item you want to cite and in the PDF viewer panel (the tabbed panel) at the right, with the Preview tab selected, you can highlight and copy the formatted citation.

Working with Styles

Styles in EndNote Desktop and Word

EndNote desktop. To select a citation style in EndNote desktop, select the style in the list of styles at the top left of EndNote. If the needed style is not showing in the list, click Select Another Style in the list and a Choose a Style window will display with a list of all styles presently installed with EndNote on your computer. Click the style you need and click the Choose button. If the needed style is not in the list, see the next section, "Adding a Style".

Some options: you can sort the list of styles in the Choose a Style window by either the name of the style or by its Category (usually a subject discipline) by clicking on the Name or Category labels at the top of the listing. Click into the list and depending on how the list is sorted, you can type the first letter (or quickly type the first few letters) and EndNote will display that part of the list. (If the list is sorted by Name, EndNote will use the Name ordering; if sorted by Category, the Category ordering.) If you click the Style Info/Preview button, you can see how the selected style cites a few example references. This can be helpful if you need to choose a style with certain attributes (for example, a style that is numbered and that italicizes the journal title) or if you are looking for a style that is like another style (trying to find one that is more completely defined).

Word. The list of styles available in Word is the same as what is available in EndNote. To add a new style in Word, you would add the style in EndNote. To select a style in Word, click the EndNote ribbon in Word and then click the Style list in the ribbon. You can simply select a style from the list and Word will reformat all EndNote citations in the current document in the newly selected style. If the style you need is not in the list, click Select Another Style. You can navigate this window with some of the same options as in EndNote desktop's Choose a Style window (described above). Click the needed style and then click the OK button. If the needed style is not included in the list, you can add the needed style to EndNote desktop (see the information in the next section, Adding a Style).

Adding a Style

If you need to add a new style to EndNote desktop, go to the EndNote website , click the Downloads menu, scroll down to Output styles and click Add output styles. Search for the citation style using the style name or the journal name (or using the other search options). If you find the style, click the style name and then click the Download this style button. The browser should download the style. Next double-click the downloaded file and EndNote should open the style in an EndNote style window. To add the style to your EndNote styles, click File + Save as. If you do not have the style yet, you can delete the word Copy in the style name. After that, the style should be findable in EndNote or Word's list of styles.

Viewing/Editing a Style

To view or edit a style in EndNote, click Edit + point at Output Styles. Two options listed here are editing the currently selected style or Open Style Manager where you can select any of the installed styles. For an example to see more of these details, select the option to edit the currently selected style. This opens the style editing window. The window has a table of contents type column to the left with many elements of the style that are accessible from the table of contents. The top section of the table of contents includes general settings for the style; the Citations section has settings for how the in-text citations will be formatted; the Bibliography (or Footnotes) section has settings for how the references will be formatted.

One very important section is Bibliography (or Footnotes) Templates. Click Templates under Bibliography. Each template defines how EndNote will create references for items of that template's Reference Type (for example, the Book Reference Type or the Journal Article Reference Type). Styles vary significantly in how many reference types are defined in EndNote's version of the style. If you are citing a Reference Type that is not defined in the selected style (for example, perhaps a Patent), EndNote will use the Generic Reference Type (which will probably not be entirely correct). If you click the Reference Types button at the top of the window, you can see a list of all possible Reference Types with check-marks indicating the ones that are defined in that style. A further comment about EndNote's version of a citation style. I have been told by EndNote technical support that employees from their company take the instructions to authors from journal websites to create the style in EndNote. If the instructions to the author only give a few examples of types of references, the EndNote style is likely to also have few templates defined. Some strategies for dealing with this are: 1) if possible, choose a citation style that has more reference types defined; 2) if a citation style is based on another style (for example, a given journal's style being based on the Chicago Manual of Style) it may be possible to add templates from the original style (though changes may be required); 3) it may be possible to edit a template from another style by reference to citations in journal articles from the journal (it may be easy to make mistakes editing the templates because of the special characters in the templates!); 4) EndNote support can help (their contact information is on the EndNote.com website).

You can click Reference Types and then select a Reference Type that is not yet defined and EndNote will add that Reference Type to the list of templates. However, the template details still have to be created. Most of the information in the template appears to be the names of fields in the EndNote reference data. When citing a reference, where a field name appears in the template, EndNote will put the data that is in that field (so, where the template says Author, EndNote will put the data from the Author field). Most of the punctuation in the template is also used as punctuation in the resulting citations (it is just copied into the citation). There are a few special characters in the templates that have a special meaning: the straight line (forced separation), a diamond symbol (link adjacent text), single backquotes (used for actually displaying text that happens to be a field name, such as DOI), and up arrows (that are used to offer alternate versions of singular and plural terms). Many of these items can be selected from the Insert Field button at the top right of the style editing window.

For much more information, see the EndNote Style Editing Guide . (On that screen there are links for the Windows and Mac PDFs beneath the video.) Be sure to check the last section, "An Easier Way: Editing Existing Styles" which begins "A far easier way to create an EndNote Style is to edit a style that already exists and save it with a new name." Also helpful is a table beginning on page 37 about the special characters used in creating the templates for reference types.

Accuracy of EndNote's citations

There are several contributing factors that result in the citations being accurate or not. Among these are: EndNote has around 6,000 styles. Only about 500 are typically installed, however, it is easy to add styles. EndNote creates these style files (files that the program uses to format citations in the different citation styles) from the instructions to authors on journal and style organization (such as APA) sites. I am more confident of this point in regard to particular journal’s citation styles. I’m not sure if the entire APA style as implemented in EndNote is based on instruction to authors. EndNote may well have referred to that style’s published manual. Very often, journals' instructions to authors will only give a few types of citations, maybe books, journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and websites. If that is all the journal shows a definition for, that’s what EndNote will include in their file. And when a reference that you are citing has a reference type (for example, Thesis) that happens to not be defined in the style that you are using, then EndNote will format the citation using its Generic reference type. So, it can be important when working with a new style to see how thoroughly it is defined and in particular to see whether all of the reference types you are citing are defined in the style. And I think it is also important to review the citations in Word to see that things are being cited as expected. It’s likely that if one uses a well-established and often-used style such as APA that some level of confidence will develop. Some of the other factors for inaccurate citations include wrong data in a database. This might be more likely in Google Scholar since editors do not check the data, however, any database could have wrong data. Another possibility of error is in the data transfer because there is an assignment of a given database field to an EndNote field. Typically these details do not result in an abundance of inaccuracies, however, I would not expect no errors in the citations. There is certainly variation between the databases (one EBSCO database was including author’s emails with author’s names in the author name field for a while because EBSCO obtained the data from the data provider that way—however that is not the usual case) and variation between the citation styles (especially individual journal styles). One other significant source of inaccurate citations is that there could be an error in the template in a citation style that tells EndNote how to format a citation for a given reference type. These templates have two specific characters (for "forced separation" and "link adjacent text") that perform a certain function in the citations and are intended to cause citations to format as well as possible when there is some missing data (such as no journal issue number). If you see a case where EndNote is incorrectly formatting a citation and the template for the reference type is defined in EndNote's style file, you may want to contact EndNote technical support (or me). They can route the request to colleagues who can edit their citation style file.

Using a Footnote Style

Most of this guide talks about adding citations as endnotes, not as footnotes, however, in this section is some information about using a footnote style. I will use the Chicago 16th Footnote style as an example. I only have limited experience in working with footnotes, so these are just introductory comments. When you have this style selected in Word, to add a footnote, you place the cursor in the document where you want to add a footnote and then use the Word menus and ribbons to insert the footnote number. In Word 2016 on the PC, the command to add a footnote is accessed through the References menu, then by clicking the Insert Footnote icon. This is in the Footnotes section toward the left of the ribbon. The Insert Footnote icon has the image AB¹. Clicking that icon in Word will add the superscript footnote number in the text and will start a footnote field at the foot of that page. While the cursor is in the footnote field, to add the actual reference, click the EndNote menu in Word, click the Insert Citation icon (the double quotes with the magnifying glass), in the window that opens in Word, search for the needed citation in the list of references from your open EndNote library or libraries, and then click the Insert button. That should add the selected citation into the footnote field. The Chicago footnote style is configured to also create a list of references that by default is displayed at the last of the text document. (The list can appear before a footnote if one appears on that same page.) If you need to add cited page(s) to the footnote, right-click the footnote reference, then point at Edit Citation(s) in the context menu, then click More in the sub-menu and put the cited page(s) in the Pages field. The information added for the cited page(s) will appear in the footnote reference, however, not in the list of references at the last of the document. (One journal article I cited had the same page number as part of the journal article reference, so that page number did appear in the reference list.) If you're citing a footnote in a document, you can input the cited page where the cited footnote appears (for example, page 100) followed by the footnote number (for example 1) as 100n1

Although it is fairly easy to change from one EndNote style to another, it is not automatic to change from a footnote style to an endnote style (a style that does not use footnotes). The problem likely has to do with the fact that Word adds the footnote numbers and footnote fields and EndNote is inputting only the reference information into the footnote fields. So, EndNote does not remove the footnote fields when trying to change to a non-footnote style. I have been told before that EndNote technical support may have some extra software tools to help change from a footnote style to an endnote style.

Word Bibliography Settings

In Word's EndNote Ribbon in the middle column of the ribbon beside the word Bibliography is a small icon (square with an arrow) that opens the Bibliography Dialog Window. On the Format Bibliography tab, some of the elements are: Temporary Citation Delimiters--these are the symbols that are used to enclose EndNote's temporary citations. If you unformat citations or are working with Instant Formatting off and add a new citation, these symbols will appear around the temporary citation (a code version of the in-text citation). In some circumstances, if you are using the symbols elsewhere in the document for some other purpose, it can create additional prompting from EndNote if EndNote is trying to process the symbols as part of a temporary citation. For that or another reason, a person might want to change the temporary citation delimiters, however, this is not a typical case (where the delimiters need to be changed), just an option. Link in-text citations to references in the bibliography--this causes Word to create links from the in-text citation to the references. The linking can interfere with editing the in-text citations (when editing is needed--because when clicking the in-text citation to edit, the linking goes to the bibliography), and sometimes people will turn off (uncheck) this option until later in the editing (perhaps just before finalizing the document). On the Layout tab, some elements are: The font and font size used for the bibliography, the bibliography title and text formatting for the title, the starting number for a numbered bibliography (this might be useful for cases where one has earlier numbering in another document), indenting for the references in the bibliography and line spacing within references and between references in the bibliography.