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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. In the EndNote tab in Word, click on the down arrow next to Tools.
  2. Click Convert to Unformatted Citations. 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. {Madigan, 2024 #31;Sant, 2022 #29}.
    endnote mac unformatted citation
    Image: Copyright © Microsoft. Used under licence.
     
  3. You can now safely copy and paste text in your document.
  4. To reformat the citations, click Update Citations and Bibliography from the EndNote tab in Word

Safely copying text and references between documents

There is a safe way to copy text with EndNote links to another document:

  1. Highlight the desired text.  
  2. Cmd+C to copy the text. 
  3. Switch to the other document. 
  4. Click the Paste icon, and from the menu select Keep Text Only. 
  5. Reinsert the EndNote reference.
    endnote mac copying references
    Image: Copyright © Microsoft. Used under licence.

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. From the EndNote tab in Word, click on the down arrow next to Tools. 
  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 using EndNote’s CWYW tools. 
  2. In the EndNote tab in Word, click on the down arrow next to Tools > Convert to Unformatted Citations.  
  3. Cut and paste documents together, inserting breaks between chapters. 
  4. To reformat the document, in the EndNote 21 toolbar in Word, 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 on the EndNote tab, click on the down arrow next to Tools > Convert to Plain Text or choose Convert Citations and Bibliography > Convert to Plain Text
  2. This will preserve your original document and create a new, unsaved version without EndNote field codes. 
  3. Save the new document under a new name, and send that version for publication.