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Reference managers

An introductory guide to three common Reference managers - EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley.

Copying text and references

Hidden code in EndNote

This section contains some useful tips for working with your documents and EndNote as you start your research journey.

There is a lot of complex hidden code that you don’t see when EndNote and Word work together. That code can be corrupted if you copy or delete references incorrectly. You can tell if a paragraph has EndNote code in it; select the paragraph and any EndNote links will be highlighted in a dark-grey block.

To safely copy text within a document or between document follow the instructions in this section.

shows EndNote code in a Word document

Image: Copyright © Microsoft. Used under licence

Copying text and references in a single document

If you are going to cut or copy and paste any part of the document, and you have already inserted citations, unformat the citations first. Unformatting will strip the bibliography from your documents, putting temporary citations into the text as placeholders.

To Unformat citations:

  1. Select Convert Citations and Bibliography.
  2. Select Convert to Unformatted Citations.

    EndNote - convert citations Word
    Image: Copyright © Microsoft. Used under licence.
     
  3. The citations will now appear with squiggly brackets, providing the author, year and the reference number for the citation in your EndNote library e.g. {Chinowsky, 2006 #58;Frank, 2003 #59}
  4. You can now safely copy and paste text in your document.
  5. To reformat the citations, select Update Citations and Bibliography.

Safely copying text and references between documents

If you wish to copy the text that contains EndNote coded references to another document, follow either the instructions in the previous section or these instructions that follow. In this method you can select whether you wish to keep or not keep the EndNote coded fields in the new document.

  1. Highlight the desired text.
  2. Press Ctrl+C to copy the text.
  3. Switch to the other document.
  4. On the Home Tab, select the drop down under Paste.
  5. Select the icon for Keep Text Only if you wish to deactivate EndNote field codes.
  6. To keep EndNote field codes, select the icon for Keep Source Formatting and then select Update Citations and Bibliography to restore the reference list.

Documents and your supervisor

When submitting a document to your supervisor

It is recommended that you unformat your document prior to submitting a copy to your supervisor for comments:

  1. Select the small arrow beside Convert Citations and Bibliography.
  2. Select Convert to Unformatted Citations.

When receiving a document from your supervisor

Be mindful of Track Changes in Word documents as EndNote does NOT work well with them. When you receive a document with Track Changes it is recommended that you either accept or reject accordingly, and only THEN apply the Update Citations and Bibliography from Word’s EndNote toolbar.

Unformatting citations and bibliographies

If you are writing a document and inserting citations over a long period of time, you should regularly unformat and then reformat your citations. You may even choose to work with unformatted citations, reformatting your documents once a week to check that the citations are appearing correctly in your document.

The in-text citations will change from e.g. (Yeo 2012) to {Yeo, 2012 #39} and the bibliography will temporarily disappear. Note that the placeholder includes the unique record number of the reference in your EndNote library e.g. #39.

It is advisable to separate your thesis chapters into separate documents, then combine them before submission.

If you intend to combine separate documents (for example, chapters) that already contain citations, unformat the citations in all the documents before combining them into a single document, then reformat them.

Merging documents to create a single bibliography

You can create a single bibliography from multiple documents, for example where each chapter of a thesis is a separate document or where you are collaborating with other EndNote users.

To generate a single bibliography

  1. In each of your documents, or chapters, insert your citations to link them to references in an EndNote library.
  2. In each Word document, go to the EndNote 21 menu, select Convert Citations and Bibliography > Convert to Unformatted Citations to unformat your citations.
  3. Cut and paste documents together, inserting breaks between chapters.
  4. To reformat the document, select Update Citations and Bibliography.

Note: If you want to format a bibliography for each subdocument plus a cumulative bibliography at the end of the master document, follow the instructions above, but use an output style that allows formatting of sections.

You can also use Word’s Master Document feature to generate a single cumulative bibliography at the end of the last combined document.

Preparing your document for submission

If you wish to submit your thesis or a paper for publication, you must first remove all field codes as these could interfere with the publishing software used to produce the journal.

  1. In Word, choose Convert Citations and Bibliography > Convert to Plain Text.
  2. This will preserve your original document and create a new, unsaved version without EndNote codes.
  3. Save the new document under a new name and send that version for publication.