Westlaw and Endnote

For a long time it has not been possible, much to the irritation of people engaged in law research, to download from the Westlaw database to Endnote.

Recently, this has changed, and journal articles (although not cases) can now have their references exported to Endnote.

First, you need to run your search on Westlaw:

The results are shown. Click on the check boxes on the left to select the items you want to download.

The download functionality is cunningly hidden in the top right hand corner next to the envelope. Click on the down arrow and select Export to Endnote.

This takes you to the Export page

Click on Submit. A .ris file will be downloaded to your local disk. Open this and it should load into your Endnote library.

Hanging Indents

Occasionally, I get asked how to remove the hanging indents from a bibliography.The hanging indents, as I’m sure you know, are the bits where the first line of a reference hangs out beyond the second on the left of the page – this is much harder to describe than to show:

This can be referenced (Burn, 1969), and so can this (Aristotle, 1984).

Aristotle (1984) 'Politics.' In: J. Barnes, (ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle, the Revised Oxford Translation Princeton University Press, 1982-2129.

Burn, A. R. (1969) 'Hammond on Marathon: A Few Notes.' The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 89, 118-120.

Some referencing styles want this, and some do not. It is not something you can control from the style.

To change this, you will need to middle tab from the familiar (at least from the last few weeks posts) Format Bibliography dialog, accessed by the box with an arrow in it in the Bibliography group of the Endnote tab.

The entry in the bottom left ‘Hanging indent:’ controls the size of the indent. Setting this value to zero will remove the indent entirely.

As you can see from this dialog, there are a number of other things you can control – the font and size of the bibliography, a title for it, the line spacing and so on. It is worth having a bit of a play with these settings to see what you can change, and select some which you like.

Instant Formatting

Mostly, when you insert a reference into a Word document from Endnote, the citation is quickly updated to be the fully formatted citation and the reference added to the reference list at the end of a document.

Sometimes, this is not the best or most convenient method of having your references formatted. For example, I mentioned last time the problem with using brackets for notes of the same type as Endnote uses for its in text citation delimiters.

If you have just one example of this, every time you insert a citation, you will get Endnote asking you which reference your bracketed comment refers to.

If this gets annoying (and it almost certainly will), you can turn off Endnote’s instant formatting feature.

To do this, click on the little arrowed box at the bottom right of the Bibliography group on the Endnote tab.

This brings up the format bibliography dialog box.

If you click on the Instant Formatting tab, you can turn the feature on and off.

Click on Turn Off and then OK.

Your citations will now remain unformatted in your document until you instruct the program to format them yourself. To do that, click on the Update Citations and Bibliography in the Bibliography group on the Endnote tab (top picture of this post).