Bracket Bother

Sometimes, you just need to put things in brackets: perhaps a note to yourself to add an argument, or finesse a point, or, perhaps simply, an aside to the reader. In the latter case, of course, round brackets (like this) are the norm, so for others you might wish to use a different shape of brackets.

When you do this, you can have some odd, and annoying, things happen when you use Endnote.

Say, for example you had the following text:

This is one example of bracket failure {it is not fatal but annoying}. This can be referenced

You then insert a reference from your library. It is quite possible that you will get a dialog box looking like this:

Endnote is asking you to track down the reference which is in the curly brackets ‘{…}’. Of course, it does not exist, because it is not an Endnote reference.

If you have only a few of these, you can just click through and ignore them. But if you are using Endnote intensively, it can get frustration that, every once in a while, Endnote will prompt you for this.

What is happening is that Endnote is looking for the particular combination of delimiters which tell it where citations are to be found. In this case it is the pair of curly brackets.

You can change the settings of Endnote to use different delimiters. You need to click on the small arrowed box on the Bibliography group on the Endnote tab.

This will bring up the Format bibliography dialog.

In the middle of top tab are the temporary citation delimiters. You can change these (preferably before you start writing!) to avoid using the same bracket type which you use for your notes and comments.

For example, if you want to use curly brackets for your note, change the delimiters to square brackets ‘[…]’. As long as you are consistent in your usage, Endnote should stop asking you to identify references for what are your writing notes.